


Wrong Side of Heaven

by IceQueen1



Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Afghanistan, Bromance, Epic Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, Gun Violence, I'll probably have to add more to these as I go, Non-Romance, Original Characters - Freeform, POW Camp, Pre-Season/Series 01, Psychological Torture, Rick Whump, Terrorist camp, Thomas Whump, Threat of violence to children, Torture, War Themes, prequel to the series, prisoners of war, this may or may not become a novel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-10-17 12:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17560217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceQueen1/pseuds/IceQueen1
Summary: After an anything but run of the mill convoy run, Magnum, Rick, TC, and Nuzo find themselves on the hunt for an elusive and possibly fabled terrorist known only as Jahangir - World Conqueror, or by his CIA alias, the Jinn, a terrorist who is rumored to be behind some of the most devastating attacks in the Kunar province. Command doesn't believe one man could be responsible for everything attributed to him, but the guys find out that evil rarely has its limits.Prequel to the series, dealing with how the guys were captured and imprisoned by the Taliban for their year and a half, and how they wound up having to save themselves. Warning for future chapters: descriptions of violence inherent with being a POW for over a year by terrorists.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so my long awaited (ha!) debut of the prequel I've been toying with ever since the pilot episode, filling in my entire head canon for how they wound up as POW's. Many thanks to @blazeofobscurity on Tumblr for putting up with the many, many, *many* pestering questions at all hours of the day to dissect random plot points, and mmorgan317 who offered to help after I made a request, and then I was a bad person and totally spaced on messaging her. So a few things: one, Afghanistan the country is as much a character in this as any person. The Dari that Thomas is speaking is actual Dari from a translator, but it's written phonetically for the Roman alphabet, since Dari is written in Perso-Arabic script, so there's probably going to be a little lost in translation. All the facts about the Hazara, the descriptions of how Kabul used to be before the Russians invaded, the towns described, all of those are real. Even the incident with the little girl is a very real, too often occurring incident. Academi is more widely known by its previous name: Blackwater. They are also real. Also, these guys are in the military, and we military do so love to swear. It's very, very toned down compared to what you would actually hear in situations like this, but fair warning, the guys swear in this. The other thing is that in this fic, there's terms used by military members to refer to members of the Taliban that are less than favorable. This is just for the sake of accuracy and authenticity, and by no means reflects a personal opinion. Which leads me to a final point of vocab: there's a fair amount of military lingo - I'm ex-Navy, so I don't know the Marine terminology for a lot, but if you have questions about what certain words mean or reference, please let me know, and I will explain them (but I think I managed to work the explanations for the dodgy ones into dialogue). Also, the title is from a Five Finger Death Punch song called "Wrong Side of Heaven". You should go check it out - it heavily inspired a lot of this.  
> Anyway. Enough delays. ONWARDS!

“So you’re telling me, you HALO jumped into North Korea –” Masters asked, scribbling as fast as he could in his notebook, writing indecipherable to anyone who tried to read it except for him, “for what? A possible defector? I didn’t even know we had actionable intel from there.”

“Details are classified,” Magnum reminded. “And the HALO jump was to avoid surveillance. That DMZ is a pretty… _effective_ deterrent to getting over there by conventional means.”

“And HALO stands for…” Robin prompted, hardly glancing up from his notes.

Rick grumbled irritably from the gunner turret of the Humvee. He was busy as a lookout, ready with the MK19, head on a swivel keeping an eye out for possible insurgents, IED’s or ambush possibilities. It also meant that he wasn’t really _in_ the Humvee – all they could see of him was from the waist down as his top half was above the roof, protected by the weapons shield. “For the love of God, Masters, I thought you were a war correspondent. We’ve been over the acronyms like a thousand times.”

“I have a poor memory,” Robin protested. He smirked over at Magnum, and Magnum tried not to laugh. Robin knew damn well what all of the acronyms were for – he’d been in and out of the Middle East and North Africa for the better part of six years. For whatever reason though, he and Rick just liked to needle at one another like bitter siblings, and one of the easiest ways for Robin to do it was feign ignorance.

“It stands for **_h_** _igh **a** ltitude **, l** ow **o** pening_,” Rick reminded. “And aren’t you a photographer? Why are you asking about missions from years ago?”

“No reason,” Masters replied innocently.

The half-filled notebook said otherwise, but Magnum didn’t mention it.

“Besides,” Robin continued, finally glancing up to peer put the tiny window of the Humvee. “It gets boring back here, I need to make conversation somehow.”

“Boring is good, Masters,” TC reminded from the driver seat. “Boring is _very_ good.”

Rick laughed at that. “Yeah, you want to trade seats? Maybe come be a human bullseye for a little while? Get that heart rate up?”

“Nope. Nope, I’m good. You’re doing a bang up job,” Robin quickly conceded.

“Ignoring the poor word choice, how about _you_ tell us something?” Rick said. “You’re from Hawaii, right? Tell us a little something about the island life so we can imagine we’re on vacation somewhere nice instead of a god-forsaken desert wasteland.”

Nuzo rolled his eyes at that description, but regrettably, Rick wasn’t far off, even if he was being sarcastic. The constant fighting for more than thirty years – and that was only when the Americans started measuring the conflicts – Afghanistan’s beautiful cities and countryside now looked like something in a post-apocalyptic movie.

Pictures of Kabul in the seventies looked like any other European city at the time. Women wore shorts and skirts, they attended schools – including college. Not every man had a beard or a turban. Cars from Europe and America drove through the streets. It even had part of the Hippie Trail run straight through it. Visitors and tourists were welcome, and movies played in the cinema dubbed in Farsi - cowboy westerns were always a favorite. Kite tournaments took place every year from the rooftops and streets of Kabul for both children and adults.

After the Russians invaded in 1979, it was the beginning of the end.

Now Kabul, Herat, Kandahar – shells of their former glory. Buildings lay in crumbled ruins while children played among them. Women in veils begged on the streets, the only legal way they were allowed to support themselves, and even then, only if the Taliban didn’t decide that today, that was against God’s will, too. Men bartered for food with their prosthetic limbs because they fetched a high price on the black market. Kites were forbidden, and the skies were empty.

They were traveling west from Jalalabad to Bagram, flanked by two of their own Humvees and by a group from Academi, a private military group better known as their prior moniker - Blackwater. Just a standard supply run, but with the increased attacks on civilians and military, they were armed to the teeth and prepared for the worst, making a long ride even longer. It was a rough three and half hour drive. The convoy had to maintain certain speeds to avoid ambush, especially in the smaller towns they passed through, and the roads weren’t paved and the Humvees weren’t exactly luxury vehicles, so the occupants bounced and rattled around like potatoes. Rick bitched non-stop about how his knees were going to look like they belonged to a 90-year-old man at his next physical.

Masters seemed to consider the request for a moment but shook his head. “Nah. Island stories require music and some of them are literally a song and dance number. I don’t have the elbow room.”

Nuzo out right laughed at that, and Thomas caught a flash of a grin in the mirror from TC. 

“Oh!” Masters suddenly snapped his fingers. “I got a good question – how did you get the nickname White Knight?”

 Rick practically cackled at that, nudging Magnum’s shoulder with his foot without taking his eyes off the terrain. “ _That_ , my friend, is an _excellent_ question. You wanna answer, Nuzo, or should I?”

“It’s a boring story,” Thomas said, grateful for the windburn that hid the fierce blush creeping up his neck. “It’s just a call sign someone gave me.”

This time Rick’s ‘nudge’ was more like a kick. “You fucking liar!”

“It’s _boring_!”

“No, it ain’t – Nuzo, fill in some blanks, would you? I’m telling you, Rob, it’s like something out of a Clive Cussler meets James Bond novel.”

Thomas punched the side of Rick’s thigh, making him yelp. “TC, Thomas hit me!”

“I swear to god, I will pull this convoy over if you two don’t stop fighting!”

“He got it from the CIA,” Nuzo finally said, smiling innocently at the death glare Thomas gave him. “Actually, technically he got it from his previous chain of command, who Thomas here may or may not have gotten along with as well as oil gets along with water, but it sticks because of the Christians in Action. You play chess, Masters?”

“Badly.”

“You know the pieces though, right?” When Robin nodded, Nuzo continued on. “Knights are the unpredictable pieces. They move in patterns at odds to the rest of the board, they can go through the defensive line in ways that other pieces can’t. They can jump over obstacles, they’re for quick thinkers, and they offer unconventional solutions. Sound like anyone we know?”

Masters grin was practically Cheshire like. “So why _White_ Knight?”

“’Cause Brown Knight would be racist, and Black Knight would be misleading and everyone would think it was TC,” Rick quipped, earning another punch from Magnum.

“No, that came from the fact that Thomas here has a savior complex that psychologists would have a field day with. Always a ‘white knight’ riding in to rescue someone,” TC explained.

“I do not!” Magnum protested. The windburn was doing nothing to hide the red now. His face felt like it was on fire all the way up to his ears.

“Uh _huh_ ,” the three guys chorused.

 “The CIA just picked it up because that was his radio handle, and they’ve been trying to recruit him for the spook business for months,” Nuzo said. “Regular Rosetta Stone, this one.”

“I can’t help that you slept through our language courses,” Thomas said, shrugging. “We’re in Afghanistan – it _behooves_ me to be able to speak at least one of the local languages.”

Nuzo smirked knowingly, elbowing Masters. “Yeah, but what he doesn’t mention is that he doesn’t speak just one, he speaks _eight_.”

Masters perked up at that. “Really? Which ones?”

Thomas glared balefully at Nuzo who just continued to smile. It wasn’t that he minded people knowing he was good with languages. They just always looked the same to him, so learning one was like learning all of them. It wasn’t until he was half way through his senior year in high school he realized not everyone looked at French and Spanish and saw words in English, but he always chalked the talent up to growing up in a bilingual household.

He just wasn’t a huge fan of _everyone_ knowing he could. It drew unwanted attention from people like Academi _and_ the CIA, and it was getting harder and harder to dodge their insistent requests to ‘borrow’ him for certain ops.

Magnum was saved from answering when Rick whistled, loud and sharp as he stood straight, bracing his feet against the side of the Humvee. “You see it?”

The vehicle was already slowing, and Nuzo and Magnum reflexively hitched their rifles higher on their shoulders.

“Yeah, I see it,” TC confirmed, coming to a halt that kicked up dust, temporarily obscuring their vision from inside the cab.

Thomas craned his head around, glancing through the narrow and scratched glass.

They were stopped in the middle of a street, in the middle of a small town – it reminded him of the old westerns and the classic showdown scenes, where ‘town’ was only fifteen buildings lining a single dirt road.

Except in the middle of this one, instead of a gunslinger ready to face them down, it was a small child.

“ _Do not exit the vehicle_ ,” warned someone over the radio. Thomas immediately recognized the voice – Academi’s chief of operations, a man named Wert that reminded Thomas more of a pit viper than a human being. While vigilant and good with a weapon, he was also _quick_ with a weapon, bordering on paranoia with all the empathy of a Nazi. “ _It could be an ambush_.”

And it could. The Taliban was not above using women and children as unknowing or unwilling (or sometimes, perfectly knowing and willing) to rush American and foreign military convoys, forcing vehicles to stop in a classic kill box positioning maneuver, preying on the social conventions of the westerners to stop for aide without thinking. They were also targets less likely to be shot, or at least, more of a delay, allowing for valuable time and ground coverage.  

Rick practically radiated energy despite being perfectly calm, keeping the MK19 swiveling towards the rooftops of the buildings that lined the single shot street. “Rooflines are clear. TC?”

“Nothing down here,” the other Marine confirmed.

“ _Just drive around_ ,” Wert snapped. “ _We don’t have time for this_.”

That was the sensible thing to do. Continue on. Stop for no one. Just _drive_.

Except Magnum finally caught a good look of the ‘road block’ and was out of the vehicle before anyone could stop him.

“And here we go – Rick, TC, you know the drill,” Nuzo ordered before immediately exiting out the other side, covering Magnum from behind while he flanked to the side, moving up the side of the street, rifle at the tactical carry position. “Masters, stay in the car.”

Rick mirrored his movements, sliding out of the turret with practiced ease, leaving the mounted gun unit. The MK19 was great for long distances and large targets where accuracy wasn’t essential, but in close quarters like this, the collateral damage risk was too high. The rounds would shred any _one_ and any _thing_ and would punch through the walls of the surrounding buildings even _after_ hitting a target. Instead, he lifted the M16 from his shoulder carry to the tactical, sweeping up the opposing side of the street.

No one noticed as Robin slunk out the back seat, Nikon clutched in his hand as he bolted for the side of the street.

“ _Magnum_ , _don’t you dare_ ,” Wert snarled across the radio. The Academi armored vehicles remained stoic and silent, no one exiting the vehicles, but not having enough room to drive around TC’s Humvee squarely in the middle of the street. “ _Get back in the goddamn truck_ , _or so help me_ -”

Anything else the man wanted to say was promptly cut off as Magnum switched the radio channels to their private one, and he knew without asking that the others had already done it.

Magnum didn’t look around for a switchman. He didn’t have to. TC has his back, Rick and Nuzo covered sides. The only thing he had to worry about was directly in front of him.

The little girl hesitated, standing in the middle of the rocky street, hand clutched around what was probably her only toy while her other hand reflexively grasped the air near her ear, almost as if searching for her mother’s hand and finding nothing.

Her once beautiful dress was a shade of its former glory. The bright blue now dulled and stained, the intricate needlework of the frock top torn and coming undone despite numerous patching. The sleeves were dirty, slightly damp and smeared from where she rubbed it across her face as she continued to cry silent tears. Her shoes were mismatched, one too small and the other too large, but at least she had some. Her head veil was little more than a ragged banner in the breeze.

The dress didn’t worry him.

The vest rigged with six bright red packs of improvised explosives that fastened around her tiny body was.

“ _Salâm_ ,” he said, smiling as he dropped to his knees in front of her. He wasn’t entirely sure what language he should be trying to pick – she wasn’t very old, maybe only three or four at the most, but he could be off. Life in Afghanistan was cruel to little things – children aged years in days. Either Farsi or Dari – both close enough she would probably understand either, but his Dari was considerably better than his Farsi. 

Her broad features and narrower eyes, her lighter skin tone and decidedly Asiatic features, combined with her clothes, he was pretty sure she was _Hazara_. The Taliban had a particular hatred for the Hazara people, claiming they were impure stains on the Afghani people since they were descendants of the Mongolians, not native population. In the early days of the Taliban occupation, there were mass killings in the north of Afghanistan. Thousands of Hazaras were killed, and those that weren’t forced to flee into neighboring countries.

Hazara _and_ a girl? As far as the Taliban was concerned, her only use was as cannon fodder.

And that was them being _kind_.

“ _Nâm-e shomâ chist_?” he asked, keeping his tone light. “What’s your name? My name is Thomas – _nâm-e man_ Thomas _ast_.”

The little girl stared blankly at him, her wide, dark eyes haunted and disturbingly vacant. He kept his smile, focusing solely on her and nothing around them. He could hear Rick and Nuzo talking over the radio in his ear, but he ignored them. All he cared about was getting her to come close enough for him to get a look at the vest and see if he could get it off her before the switchman blew it. He took off his helmet, pulling down his Oakleys so they hung around the back of his neck.

He figured if he looked more like a person, less like a soldier, she might interact with him. Even if he was gonna catch hell for taking off his helmet – first from Nuzo, then from Rick and TC, and then from Greene – it’d be worth it if he could get her to talk to him while Nuzo and Rick swept for the switchman – because there _had_ to be one. Children her age couldn’t be trusted to hold a trigger switch until they needed to. They were detonated remotely from an adult that waited until the most opportune moment. It wouldn’t even matter if the convoy hadn’t stopped – they would’ve just blown it as they neared her. 

“ _Shomâ chand sâl dârêd_?”

She blinked. Her free hand paused its compulsive opening and closing. In a small, tiny voice he had to strain to hear, she whispered _“Man châr sâl dârom_.”

“You’re four?” he repeated, holding up four fingers. “Wow. That’s pretty good. I’m _much_ older than that.” English was probably not in her repertoire, but he was aiming for tone more than vocabulary. “ _Man si-o-sê sâl dârom,_ ” he told her in a stage whisper. “ _Goftan nakon!”_ He put a finger to his lips, swearing her to secrecy. “Don’t tell anyone.”

There was the barest flicker of a smile for that, and he couldn’t help the broadening of his own. “I knew I would get a smile out of you. _Nâm-e shomâ chist_?”

This time, the girl answered. “Soraya.”

“ _Qashang_ ,” he told her. “Beautiful. Just like that smile.”

“ _Keep her smiling, Thomas_ ,” Nuzo cautioned over the radio. “ _Can you see a cellphone on that rig_?”

Magnum looked at the vest but saw nothing close to a trigger. Usually they were fastened up front, clipped to the front of the vests and wired to the detonator. It made it easier for the suicide bombers to set them off, rather than have to reach for them, allowing someone to shoot them or disarm them before they blew themselves and half a street.

But those were adults with a mission in mind. This was a four-year-old girl.

“ _Soraya jan_ ,” he asked, turning his finger in a clockwise motion, indicating for her to turn around. “ _Bar ghastan_? _Lotfan_?”

Soraya studied him for a moment, and he could see a wary intelligence start to flicker in those once vacant eyes. Good. She was engaging. He always admired their resiliency. He made sure to keep his smile plastered on, keeping it sincere.

“ _Lotfan_ ,” he asked again. “Please?”

After a long moment, Soraya turned, her free hand grabbing the top hem of her dress as she slowly twirled, showing off her dress with a shy smile. Little girls and their dresses were a universal constant – Magnum was sure of it.

As soon as her back was to him, he felt his heart stutter. “ _Estâd shaw_!” he demanded, harsher than he meant to. Soraya froze, her tiny shoulders hunching forward as she ducked her head, obviously expecting a physical blow. “No, shit, sorry… _Mota’asefam!_ I’m not mad, it’s okay – _mowâfeq_.”

“ _You find the detonator_?” Rick asked.

“Yeah,” Magnum confirmed. “Cellphone. It’s strapped to her back so she can’t mess with it and detonate early. You guys are looking for someone close enough to have eyes on her.”

“ _If that’s the case, why hasn’t he blown it_?” Rick pointed out. “ _You’re less than three feet from her_.”

“I’m one guy. Not enough of a soft target. He’s hoping more of us come to her aid – or for her to go running to the vehicles.” Magnum paused trying to look around without making it obvious to the switchman, wherever he was. “Or he’s trying to goad us into having to shoot her and use it as anti-American propaganda.”

People weren’t in the street anymore, but they were still watching from the windows and from the shaded market stalls and boarded sidewalks in front of the buildings. Morbid curiosity kept people that should’ve had the common sense to get as far from the doors and the street as possible standing around, anxiously muttering to one another about what they thought was going to happen. The locals were so desensitized to violence, they had no sense of self-preservation.

“ _Not to be a negative Nancy here_ ,” TC chimed in, “ _but what exactly **is** your preferred choice out of all those outcomes_?”

“The one where Nuzo or Rick shoots the switchman before he can do anything, we save the girl, and we all go home happy and in one piece,” Magnum said. “Duh.”

“ _Can you get the vest off of her_?” Rick asked. “ _It’s going to take us a second to clear the crowd if we have to worry about him getting twitchy and making you go boom_.”

Magnum bit his lower lip. “Technically, maybe?”

“ _Wow_ ,” Nuzo drawled. “ _Vague even by your standards. Yes or no, Magnum_.”

“Yes, I can get it off her, it’s just zippered up the front and electrical tape on either side. But I can’t see if there’s a mercury switch, a trip wire, anything like that. And even if I could get it off her, what’s to stop him from blowing it then? And where would I put it? I can’t throw it, it’s too crowded, the IED is enough to take out the closest civilians…”

 “ _So finding the switchman is our only option. Gotcha. Could’ve just said ‘no’,”_ Rick complained. It wasn’t a real complaint. Just a light tone for what was looking more and more like Thomas’s last day on Earth. Rick complaining was a default setting – it was when he stopped that one needed to worry.

Finding the switchman _was_ their only option, but it raised its own problems, too. If the switchman thought he was out of options, he would blow the vest, taking Soraya and Thomas with it, and half the too-curious onlookers. 

“Soraya _jan_ ,” Thomas said gently, holding his arms out for her. “ _Bar ghastan_ , you can turn around again. _Âmadan_.”

“ _Magnum_ ,” Rick said suspiciously, drawing out the vowels in his name. “ _What’re you doing, bud_?”

Soraya cautiously peeked over her shoulder at him. Her shoulders still hunched forwards. She didn’t know whether or not to believe him.

“ _Man mota’asefam_. I’m sorry, Soraya _jan_. I didn’t mean to yell at you. _Âmadan_. Come here.” He kept his arms out, crouching low so he was eye level with her.

“ ** _Magnum_** ,” TC snarled.

“I’m helping find the target,” Thomas said, voice pitched the same low, even tone he was using on Soraya. She didn’t know what he was saying in English, but he hoped the tone would convince her he was still trying to help her.

“ _By doing **what**_?”

Soraya finally turned, taking a hesitant step towards him. She mimicked his smile, though on her it looked painfully brittle, like she was just copying him without knowing _why_ he was smiling at her – just that she should do the same.

“By giving him an impossible to resist target,” Thomas said.

* * *

 

“ _Harakat kardan_ ,” Rick ordered, cutting quickly down the shaded side of the street. “Move!” The ragged ruins of the market stall canopies were all that were left, but they offered more than enough distraction and hiding places.

Nosy and curious onlookers made the search harder than it needed to be, but as interesting as Thomas was, an American soldier with a rifle aimed _at_ you was more than compelling reason to get back inside.

His gaze swept up and down every person he saw, looking at their hands, their chests, anything that could be another vest, another hidden weapon, a cellphone, or radio. Someone who wouldn’t take their eyes off the macabre scene in the street and ignored his commands to move out of the way.

He half listened to Magnum’s conversation with the girl – Thomas was always the best with kids, even though Nuzo was the one _with_ a kid. Most of it was in Dari, which Rick knew some key phrases for, but not the ones Magnum was using. Knowing him, he was probably telling her she had a pretty dress or asking her favorite color.

Nuzo, on the other hand, he listened for.

“ _My side’s clear_ ,” Nuzo reported. “ _I’m finding an elevated position_.”

“ _Fobbits are getting antsy_ ,” TC said, referencing the contractors, who still hadn’t exited their vehicles. God only knew what they were threatening over the vehicle’s radio. “ _You may have some unwanted company in a second_.”

Rick herd the derisive snort from Nuzo before he had a chance to reply. “ _You mean they’ll risk their manicures getting their hands dirty? Doubt it. Tell ‘em to sit tight while we save the day_.”

He glanced back towards the street, motion from Magnum catching his attention and he almost froze dead in his steps. Thomas was crouched on one knee in the street, his helmet in the dirt next to him and his sunglasses turned around on the back of his neck. He was clearly trying to get the little girl’s attention, and as she cautiously turned back towards Magnum, Rick saw his hand go up, his hands gesturing for her to come closer to him. 

“Magnum,” Rick said suspiciously, drawing out the vowels in his name. “What’re you doing, bud?”

Magnum ignored him, talking to the girl still and again, mostly in Dari. But Rick understood enough of it that for one kneejerk moment, he was tempted to run into the street to slap the shit out of the man, and judging from TC’s growled warning, the other Marine wouldn’t be far behind.

“You mother _fucker_ ,” Rick hissed and felt his heart skip a beat when he heard Thomas’s explanation. Sound logic as it was, Thomas just put a ticking clock on this bullshit, and if they lived through this, he was gonna _kill_ him. “Eyes, Nuzo? TC?”

“ _Nothing from here_.”

“ _Maybe – **on your right** ,_” Nuzo snapped. “ _Just beyond the pillar in front of you, haji in white and he’s got his hand on something_. _Can’t make out what though – bad angle. Eyes?”_

Rick swung around the corner, several feet back to keep himself out of tackle range in case the target got desperate. Men with knives were notoriously faster in close quarters than men with guns, and the last thing Rick was looking to do was to get stabbed and live just long enough to watch one of his best friends get blown to kingdom come.

“ _Dasthaa balaa_!” he ordered, “Hands up!”

The man startled, so focused on Thomas and the girl that he hadn’t been paying any attention to the armed Marine sweeping up the sidewalks. He spun around to face Rick, hands immediately coming up to the ‘surrender’ pose. “ _Fayr nako_!” he shouted, waving his hands. “ _Fayr nako!_ ”

Rick was 99% positive that was ‘don’t shoot’, but he knew more Russian than Dari. “Hands!” he repeated, rifle raised and his hand along the trigger. His heart was going a mile a minute, but his hands were steady, his vision narrowed down the length of the rifle at the man.

The man was wearing thick gloves, and he wasn’t holding them palm out – they were both raised in clenched fists, and between the crap angle, the fact that he was waving his hands around like a goddamn cheerleader at a pep rally and the material, Rick couldn’t tell if he was holding anything or not.

“Let me see your hands!” Rick yelled. “ _D_ _ast häy-e-tän rä beeroon-e-pan-jara begered!”_

The once curious onlookers now were screaming, fleeing the area as they tripped over one another and shoved each other out of the way. TC was yelling something over the radio, whether at him or Thomas or Nuzo, he didn’t know – his entire focus was on the man in front of him who still refused to open his hands, backing up into the street even as Rick followed after him.

“ _Fayr nako!_ ” the man repeated, over and over again, getting louder as if volume was going to make Rick back off.

“I won’t shoot if you _fucking show me your hands,_ ” Rick snarled. He didn’t have to check if Nuzo had the guy covered from wherever he’d found a perch – the entire street would be unobstructed views for anyone with an elevated position.

 The man stumbled in his rush, hitting the ground with his knees, ducking his head and curling in on himself, as if he expected Rick to strike him with the rifle.

What a wonderful photo op that would make for Masters – a pleading man on his knees, beaten over the head by an American Marine. As if the anti-war sentiment wasn’t already at a peak.

“ ** _Show me_** –” Rick didn’t even finish the command. The man suddenly lurched upright, clutching something small and black in his hand. The earlier panic was gone – the man met his eyes with glare and a bright, gap toothed smile.

It was a cellphone.

“ ** _MAGNUM!_** ”

It was the only warning he could manage.

“ _Jahangir – e_ ,” the man hissed, and hit the ‘call’ button on the cheap cellphone in his hand, at the exact same moment Rick and Nuzo fired.

Time slowed.

Movies always showed people being thrown back from the force of a bullet. Proof that they’d never seen anyone shot at close range before. Sure, the force of the bullet entering the body knocked them back, but what everyone failed to take into account was the force of the bullet _exploding_ out the other side.

The entrance wound wasn’t a near, dime sized hole, but a star-shaped split – almost like the crosshairs on the rifle scope still leveled at his head.

Or what remained of it.

Close range M16 to the skull didn’t leave an open-casket corpse.

Nuzo’s shot had to go lower to avoid accidentally hitting Rick if the bullet hadn’t been stopped by the body. Angled down, he’d managed to fire through the spinal column.

Even as the echo of the gunshots faded, it took a second to realize something wasn’t quite…

In a single voice, all three of them shouted for Thomas.

* * *

 

Only half of his plan was getting the triggerman to reveal himself with an irresistible target.

The other half was in several parts.

One, getting Soraya to come close enough that he could hug her was a pure and simple way to offer the only comfort he could. As she felt his arms encircle her, her entire body stiffened like an electrical current seized her, but once she realized he wasn’t trying to hurt her, that he was offering probably the only comfort she’d known in God only knew how long, she burst into uncontrollable tears that shook her entire body. Her hands came up around his neck as she pressed her face into his collar, sobbing.  

Two, it allowed him to look at the cellphone rigging without _looking_ like he was messing with it. They didn’t know if the switchman was ahead of them, behind them, above…there were too many scenarios to consider to openly try and disarm it. If the switchman thought Magnum had half a chance of disarming it, he’d blow it even if the only two people killed were Thomas and Soraya.

And three, if Rick and Nuzo _didn’t_ find the switchman before he detonated the device, Magnum would be enough of a shield that the blast would be minimally contained – it _was_ six explosive packs of shrapnel, and Magnum was only so big, but it could be the difference between someone being injured and someone being killed. Like throwing yourself on a grenade to save the rest of your team.

Except, you know…six grenades.

He looked up from trying to determine if the cellphone could be detached when he heard Rick shouting, saw the man stumble into the streets and keep retreating despite Rick’s repeated orders to stop moving and put his hands up.

It wasn’t until the man hit his knees and doubled over that Thomas caught a glimpse of the black device in his hand.

“ _Shit_ ,” he swore violently. Loud enough that Soraya startled and went to pull away, but he caught her and threw them both to the ground, his body covering hers so that any blast would catch him instead of civilians – or TC, who was only twenty feet behind him. “ _Didan nakon!”_ he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut, bracing for the end. “Don’t look!”

He flinched when he heard the twin rifle shots, fired so close together it almost sounded like one, fully prepared for that to be the last thing he heard.

Except.

 _Except_.

Nothing happened.

Magnum didn’t move, and neither did Soraya, wrapped in his arms like a bear hug. He was afraid if he moved, whatever miracle that kept them from getting killed in that second would be over. His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel Soraya’s spike too, as if she finally understood what was happening. More likely she wondered what the hell he was doing.

Strong hands grabbed the back of his TAC vest, pulling him over and onto his side, pulling Soraya with him so he was no longer on top of her as a shield.

“Thomas? _Thomas_?!”

Thomas blinked in the bright overhead sun, his brain feeling like it was caught in quicksand. TC leaned over him, blocking out the light enough for him to finally be able to see.

“Am I dead?” he asked.

“Not yet,” TC said, heaving a sigh of relief. “But Rick and Nuzo might fix that.”

Magnum tilted his head back, looking backwards and upside down towards the street. Nuzo was already on the radio, calling in to base, but Rick looked like he was giving serious consideration to shooting the already dead man again.

And then Thomas.

Just for good measure.

Uh oh.

“You _stupid_ , selfless, _god **damn** motherfucker_,” Rick raged, marching over, murder clearly in his eyes. “What the _fuck_ were you thinking? You couldn’t just, oh, I don’t know, _not antagonize_ an already volatile situation? What would’ve happened if his cellphone hadn’t malfunctioned? Or jammed, or batteries went dead, or _whatever the hell just saved your ass from your own heroics_?”

“Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, that’s for sure,” Thomas said without thinking, offering a wry grin.

Rick’s eye twitched and jabbed a finger at Thomas. “Heroes get dead, Thomas. I’m not writing home to your mom to tell her that the reason why her son is dead is because he has the self-preservation of a lemming.”

It was a low blow, and Rick knew it as soon as the words left his mouth. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Except the part about the lemming. That I _totally_ meant.”

 Thomas couldn’t help the flinch anyway but made a vague attempt to hide it by sitting up, checking on Soraya who seemed to have lapsed back into a state of mild shock. She stared up at Rick and TC, mouth open in surprise, which was as much of a distraction as Magnum needed to get the vest off, handing it to Rick who held it gingerly at arm’s length. They’d dispose of it later, before they left the town, where it wouldn’t cause any harm to the town or the people in it.

“ _Zenda_ ,” he told Soraya, smiling broadly. “ _Hastêm zenda._ We’re alive!” He took her tiny hand in his and made a tiny fist bump, then drew it back, waggling his fingers as he did so. She stared at him in surprisingly fierce concentration, trying to mimic the movement back. Except she couldn’t make the fake exploding noise, and wound up saying something that sounded like “ _che che che_ ” instead.  

“Only you would quote a Disney movie eight seconds after dodging death,” Rick huffed, glancing back for Nuzo, who was still on the radio. He winced. Greene wasn’t going to be happy about this.

“Says the guy who recognized the Baymax fist bump,” TC pointed with a snort. Which became a giggle. Which made Soraya laugh. And then Thomas laughed, which made TC laugh harder, and suddenly they were _all_ laughing.

Shock was weird.

“When you knuckleheads are done giggling, one of you want to find our missing photographer?” Nuzo asked, finally joining them. As TC volunteered to go find Masters – wherever the hell he managed to disappear to - he ran a quick appraising eye over Thomas and Soraya, raising an eyebrow in question. “Magnum?”

“We’re fine,” Thomas assured. “Not that I know _how_ , but…yeah. We’re good. She’s good. We’re…okay?”

Nuzo held up the cellphone he’d picked off the body. “An act of God, that’s how. Guy didn’t set it up right – airplane mode or something. But it’s no outgoing signal.”

Thomas felt his jaw drop before he could even stop it. That was a one in an…extremely high mathematical figure he couldn’t comprehend…chance.

“You know, one of these days, those nine lives of yours are gonna run out,” Nuzo reminded. “What’s your plan then?”

“Rick already read me the riot act, Nuz,” he said. He gently moved Soraya off his lap, waiting for her to stand so he could get up, brushing the dirt and sand from his frogsuit.   

“Rick also give you the _bad_ news?”

“Bad news? As in worse news than we have to report this to Greene, and Wert is probably gonna throw us under the bus for breaking protocol and jeopardizing crew members and losing our civilian?”

 “Found him!” TC shouted from the sidewalk of the opposite side of the street where the switchman was hiding.

Masters waved sheepishly from sidelines, offering a half-apologetic shrug. “Anyone who stays in the car is the one who winds up dead!” he called by way of explanation.

Thomas eyed the camera that was out, the mid-range lens firmly attached, the neck strap wrapped around Robin’s right hand. It was something he only did when he was busy shooting so he had more range of motion to get better angles than just leaving it strapped around his neck.

He sincerely doubted _that_ story, but it wasn’t like it mattered. Just as long as he made sure to see what the photos were before he published them.  

“Yeah, actually,” Nuzo said. “Before he tried to blow us all to smithereens, the guy said ‘ _Jahangir-e_ ’ – for Jahangir, right?”

Thomas froze. “You’re sure? Jahangir, that was the name he gave?”

Nuzo nodded grimly. “You ever know Rick to get intel wrong?”

No. No, he did not. Which kind of made it worse.

Jahangir – world conqueror – was better known to the military as his CIA alias name, _Jinn_.

The Demon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the deal. I have been apparently forgetting a lot of the English language over the past month, and I blame it entirely on taking three different computer language classes at once. Also, should you happen to be a prior service member, you're gonna notice a lot is totally fudged on this, and I did it on purpose. The other thing is that when I was in, I was kind of a shit, and I didn't use any of the military lingo I was supposed to, and I have done my best to forget it (though it always comes back when I go to veteran events). Anyway. The Navy uses different *everything* than everyone else - different language, different rank names, different ways of referring to people, eleventy billion different uniforms all with their own nitpicky rules on when and where you can wear them...so I'm not a hundred percent sure anyone would be able to read this if I did use all the proper terminology. Anyway. ONWARDS!

“We’ve been over this, Lieutenant,” Greene said, pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off what was sure to be a corker of a migraine.

It was _always_ a migraine when Magnum was involved.

 _Always_.

Prior enlisted always made the most obnoxious officers, and Magnum was no exception, and worse – he was a SEAL who’d been to the Academy. Trying to get him to do as he was told _when_ he was told was like trying to nail Jello to a tree.

“Sir, I know, but look –” Magnum pointed to the map spread out across the desk, indicating the route they’d just come back from. “I know Jahangir can’t be responsible for _everything_ that his name gets attached to. It’s not feasible. It’s not _possible_. But that doesn’t mean that _some_ of these attacks aren’t his. Like the one today?” Magnum jabbed at the tiny blip along the route. “It’s always a possibility that the Taliban is going to use kids or women or soft targets to get closer to us. That’s not new. But the _way_ these are happening? Hazara women and children, between the Korengal, Jalabad and Bagram – stopping convoys of five or fewer vehicles by sending the victims into the streets where the convoys have no other options but to stop, retreat, or risk being blown up?”

Greene sighed. “That’s a thin line,” he warned. “And like you said, hardly a new tactic of the Taliban. If that’s all you got –”

“It’s the same bombs,” Magnum interrupted. “You know they’re like signatures, sir. Even if the switchman hadn’t said a name, he might as well have handed us a signed declaration. It’s the same guy, sir.”

“You’re not ordnance, Lieutenant. And last I checked, neither was anyone on your team.”

Magnum shrugged. “You’re right. We’re not. But Crash is.”

Greene felt his eye twitch. “Tell me you didn’t bring a live _bomb_ back to base for that psychopath to take a look at.”

The SEAL huffed irritably. “Of course not.”

Greene heaved a sigh of relief.

“We dismantled it first.”

Greene fought the urge to hit his head against the table. “Look, we’ve tried to follow this trail before, Lieutenant. Everything and everyone came up empty,” he pointed out. “The intel community, the Afghani military, hell even Hannah’s contacts have come up with fuck all to prove your theory that Jahangir is an actual guy and not just a name. It doesn’t _matter_ what people are doing in his name, because how are you going to stop it? You can’t kill a ghost, son. It’s just not possible. And I am not letting you and your buddies go haring off after fairy tales so you can get yourselves killed or worse – someone else.”

“But sir –”

Greene held up a hand. “I’m not disagreeing that there’s a bomber out there who’s MO is to strap vests to kids to lure out American troops. I’m not even disagreeing that people are using a name to justify it. I _am_ however, disagreeing it’s a _real_ person’s name.”

“You think this is what, a Dread Pirate Roberts situation?”

“You know this country, Magnum. You know the people, what it’s like here for them, what it’s _been_ like for them. How do you know that you’re not just playing into this exactly how they want you to by believing it’s one guy who somehow manages to pull strings for half a dozen different terrorist cells across the Kunar province? Nobody here likes one another. Half our allies are trying to kill each other. The Taliban’s long-standing tactic is to force their members to be so god awful that people are afraid of them without ever meeting them. If they invent a name and pin all of their tactics on their fictional leader, then they’ll have the United States military chasing their tails trying to find someone who isn’t there while the continue on.”

Magnum considered it for a moment, before he slowly shook his head. “I understand what you’re saying sir, it’s just…there’s too much here that _is_ connected for it to just be the name tying them together. It feels more like a smokescreen than a lie.”

“So help me God, lieutenant, if you say it’s a gut feeling, I will relegate you to babysitting journalists until your time is up,” Greene threatened. “And _no_ , I will not let it be Masters. I’ll find you one of the worst ones I can, who’s afraid of camel spiders, heights, and a general lack of running water. Your ‘gut’ is not a viable source of intel that I am willing to bet lives on.”

“But – ”

“Here’s the deal – find a shred of proof that you’re right, _without_ haring off to get killed on an unsanctioned mission, and then we can continue this conversation. But until then…” Greene drew his index finger across the base of his neck. “Not a word.”

“So we’re stuck on base until Hannah’s contacts come up with something?” Magnum protested. “That could be days, weeks – hell, sir, it could be months.”

“For someone so sure he’s right, you seem to have a pretty dim outlook on someone finding proof of it,” Greene pointed out. “But _fuck_ no, I am not leaving you idiots on base without something to do. I still have nightmares about the last time you and Wright got bored.”

“In our defense, sir, I think we can all agree that those monkeys seemed perfectly tame at the time.”

Greene’s eye twitched. “You’re going in support of the 3rd battalion and the local military on a recon mission. They leave tomorrow at 0500, and you’re going with them.”

Magnum gave a long suffering, utterly dramatic sigh that Greene immediately mimicked back.

“Cry me a river, lieutenant. Consider it a vacation. You can even take Masters with you. Because I am _that_ nice. Talk to Captain Markham for debrief before you leave. Wright and Calvin will be air support and EXFIL. I want you keeping an ear out – Markham doesn’t have an interpreter of his own, and while I don’t expect the Afghani military to lie or mistranslate on purpose, I would prefer we had our own set of ears.”

“Yes, sir,” Magnum said, in the same tone someone would say ‘drop dead’. “Understood.”

Before Magnum stepped outside the tent, Greene called after him. “And Lieutenant? Good work today.”

Magnum offered a crooked smile and a half assed salute before disappearing out the door flap.

Greene shook his head. God, that kid was a pain in the ass.

(*(*(*

Rick veered left and right, zig zagging while making plane engine noises, Soraya on his shoulders with her hands in his as he held her arms out straight as TC and Nuzo marveled at the resiliency of children.

It’d taken a while – most of the afternoon – but Rick had finally managed to teach her what _play_ meant. Rick knew enough Dari to get a point across, though most of it was strictly military related. Things like “put your gun down” and “what groups or individuals in this area have expressed anti-American sentiment?”, but vocabulary didn’t seem to matter as much as tone.

She’d yet to take a liking to TC – he seemed a little too big for her, and Nuzo just waved them off when it was clear Rick was having just as much fun as the four-year-old on his shoulders pretending to be a plane.

“You finally have someone your own maturity level to play with,” Nuzo commented from his perch on the craptastic lawn chair someone dug out from…somewhere. No one was entirely sure where it came from. It was cheap, broken in three places, and posed a serious risk of tetanus to those who were unvaccinated, but it beat sitting on the hard and rocky ground and as Nuzo pointed out frequently – he was an old man, and he earned the chair.

“You’re just jealous because she likes me better,” Rick said in between motor sounds. Soraya was figuring out he would turn in whatever direction she pulled his hands and was giggling like a normal four-year-old instead of the disturbing vacancy from when they first spotted her. “I’m a people person. It’s a gift.”

“You _bribe_ people,” TC corrected.

“What an ugly word, TC. I would never. Do I find things for people? Sure. Do I make connections that benefit me and our little band of misfits? Yes. Do I sometimes misappropriate said relations to get a basketful of pomegranates delivered to COMSEC so that Rabbit fixes our equipment first and possibly sabotages Academi’s while she’s at it? Who’s to say?”

“That sounds like a bribe. Does that sound like a bribe to you, Nuzo?” TC asked, turning to the chief.

“It’s been a while since I looked up the dictionary definition of the word, but off the top of my head? Yeah. I’d say so.”

Rick paused in his flight pattern, skidding slightly on the loose gravel. “Hey, Soraya, how do you say jerkface in Dari?”

“There’s no direct translation,” Thomas offered as he strode towards the group. “But you can try _nâdân_.”

“ _Nâdân_!” Soraya shouted, grinning brilliantly.

“ _Nâdân_!” Rick echoed her enthusiasm. “Now what did I teach you, kid?” He pulled his hand away from hers, but not out of reach, holding it up flat with his palm towards her.

She slapped him a high five.

“Damn straight, kid. Now, where were we?”

“ _Vrooooom_ ,” Soraya said, trying and failing miserably at rolling her ‘r’ for the make-believe engine noise. Rick didn’t seem to care, because with no further prompting, he was off, the girl giggling like mad.

Nuzo shot Thomas a scowl. “Seriously, Thomas? Did you just teach a kid a swear?”

Magnum looked affronted. “I would never. It means ‘fool’.”

“You’re not a jet pilot, Orville,” TC called out. “You don’t fly in anything with wings!”

“Well _fine then_ , get all technical on us, why don’t you?” Rick retorted before promptly stopping dead in his tracks to start spinning madly in place. “ _We must go forwards, not backwards, upwards, not forwards, and constantly whirling, WHIRLING TOWARDS FREEDOM!”_

Soraya shrieked with delight, leaning back with her face up towards the sky.   

 “What’d Greene say?” Nuzo asked as Thomas dropped down beside him, fiddling absently with a broken stick in his fingers.

Magnum sighed. “Nothing I didn’t expect,” he hedged. “That we don’t have enough proof to risk trying to find more.”

“But Hannah’s on it, right? Her people will come up with something. They always do,” Nuzo said, elbowing him lightly when he noticed the faraway look taking hold. The one that said Thomas was anywhere but here, running through a million different scenarios and options and paths to take. “Sometimes, all you can do is wait.”

“I know, man. I know. I just…there’s something _off_ about this whole thing. I can _feel_ it. Like…” he trailed off, breaking off part of the stick. “I feel like this is leading up to something. Something big. Something _bad_.”

“Like?”

Thomas threw the twig down in frustration, scrubbing a hand through almost-too-long-to-be-in-regs hair, smearing dust through the jet-black mop. It made him look even younger than he already was. “I don’t _know_. It just seems like…showmanship, doesn’t it? Like…there’s _just_ enough to get our attention, but not enough for anyone up the chain to take it seriously enough to pursue? I feel like someone is setting a stage, and we’re just…” he growled slightly, fingers tightening against his scalp in a grip that made Nuzo wince and glad he shaved his head, “walking right into it.”

“Unpopular opinion,” Nuzo offered. “Thomas Magnum’s infamous Gut Feeling _can_ be wrong from time to time. We’ve been running non-stop for the last few weeks. Not that it hasn’t paid off, because it has, but maybe we should take a breather, huh? Delta, Gold Squadron, they can take some of Hannah’s tips for a while. It’s their gig, too, you know. Maybe we can see if Rick can work his magic and he can find some more Johnnie Walker Blue.”

Thomas smirked at that, lips twisting into a crooked grin that Nuzo knew the women found absolutely irresistible – he knew, because Lara commented on it every time he came to dinner and swore if she hadn’t already married the love of her life, she would be the new Mrs. Magnum. “You know, I still don’t know how the hell he finds four-hundred-dollar whisky in a country that bans alcohol.”

“The question is: do we care?”

“Not one bit.” Thomas grinned. “But, unfortunately, just because we can’t go off after Jahangir doesn’t mean we have down time. We’re off tomorrow morning at first light with the 3rd battalion and the locals for a weapons search in the Korengal.”

Nuzo whistled low. “The Valley, huh?”

“Yep,” Magnum drawled, making a small popping noise on the ‘p’. “We’re gonna go with on foot, Rick and TC are part of EXFIL. I just talked to Markham. There’s gonna be 14 of us – us five, four of our guys and four Afghani military personnel.”

“Well _shit_. When was the last time we ran a mission with more than just the four of us?” Nuzo marveled. “I’m not sure if I’m insulted or relieved.”

“And we’re taking Robin.”

Nuzo snorted, glancing back at Rick who’d given up spinning when he’d started to list dangerously to one side and was now flat on his back with Soraya held aloft in his arms Superman style, her arms out to her sides as Rick ‘flew’ her from one side to the other. “Can’t be expecting too much if they’re sending a civilian. They say what we’re gonna do with her?” he jutted his chin towards Soraya.

“Aid workers should be here before nightfall,” Thomas said flatly. “They’re taking her to the local orphanage, seeing if they can’t find a living relative of hers near the village we found her in. And if not…” he let the sentence hang.

It was a grim outlook. Orphanages in Afghanistan were packed to overcrowding, run entirely on private donations and foreign aid. Adoption under the current government was illegal. Guardianship could be awarded to blood relatives, but first they had to be found, and the child’s parents had to be declared officially dead with a death certificate. In the best of circumstances, the aid workers would find a relative of Soraya’s and eventually get them across the border into Iran, where they had a better chance. Slightly worse – and much more likely – was the overcrowded and underfunded orphanage would put her out on the streets as soon as she could fend for herself, which in Afghanistan was the ripe old age of ten.

The worst of possibilities didn’t bear thinking on – that when the Taliban came looking for child wives for their members, they would take the girls and the orphanage would let them, because a refusal meant more than losing a child – it meant that the Taliban would come back with more men. With guns. With torches. And kill everyone and burn the building to the ground – if they were lucky, in that order – to serve as a warning to anyone that would dare deny their leaders anything.

And even if they found Soraya’s relatives, it didn’t mean she would be any better off.

In recent months, the American military had been forced to stop offering medical aid to locals because parents would purposely maim their children – burning their feet, cutting their arms, smashing their heads – to be allowed onto military installations to run reconnaissance for the Taliban, scout the lay of the land, or worse…came on with vests much like the one they took off Soraya that morning to take out soft targets like hospitals and chow halls.

Nuzo wondered if Soraya would thank them for saving her at all.

“At least she has today,” TC offered quietly. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of Rick and Soraya, the latter of which was now flat on her back next to Rick while he pointed out shapes in the thin clouds above. She didn’t seem to care much of what he said, and he didn’t seem to mind as she animatedly gestured towards the sky.

They all understood the cost of war.

“Is it worth it though?”

The bigger man shrugged. “It has to be. ‘Cause it’s all we got.”

 )*)*)*

“So, wait, why can’t someone adopt her?” Robin asked, pulling absently at the neckline of his vest.

Normally, if it weren’t for the fact that instead of a gun hanging around his neck in a three-point sling, he had a Nikon camera, Robin Masters would be easily distinguishable from the rest of the soldiers. Journalists weren’t often in a uniform and they usually wore protective gear over their civilian clothes. Well, that, and the huge white label across his Kevlar vest that stated ‘PRESS’ in capital black and white letters. In smaller script just below it, in the Perso-Arabic script alphabet in Dari, was ‘ _zhornâlist’_ – journalist. Theoretically, the idea was that the Taliban was less likely to shoot an unarmed journalist if he was properly labelled.

Rick called it a Taliban Bullseye – especially since it was highly unlikely anybody shooting at them could read. Literacy in Afghanistan was somewhere around single digit percentages and dropping rapidly thanks to the destruction of most schools and rigid rules about what could and could not be taught under Taliban rule.

But today, Masters was in full combat uniform. No short sleeves and khaki pants, his clothes were digital camouflage like the rest of them – except he kept pushing the sleeves up past his elbow in a decidedly ­ _un_ authorized fashion. His helmet, which he constantly complained about being too hot and too heavy and smelling of Fritos, was bulletproof, just like the plates under his vest, and his scuffed and worn black combat boots were higher quality than theirs.

“Adoption is illegal in Afghanistan,” Magnum explained. “Relatives can be appointed guardianship, but guardianship isn’t enough to basically import kids to foreign nations. And there’s a lot of social and religious technicalities here that don’t exist in the US or most of Europe that keep it from being feasible.”

Unlike the other war journalists that they’d been stuck with over the years in their various deployments – they were inevitably on the front line of wherever they were sent – Masters was by far the most tolerable. He was personable enough that many of the villagers they encountered were more than willing to talk to him – or at least, around him or to a translator. Social customs kept many from talking directly to uniformed soldiers, but not to civilians, especially since Masters wasn’t Caucasian. Once locals realized he wasn’t looking to publish biased stories against the Taliban, or anyone else, they would clamor over one another to tell their stories to him. Some had nothing to do with the war. The Afghani people were extremely proud of their story telling history and wanted the opportunity to tell people about their country and their lives.

And it was almost always Thomas who was the one translating between them.

Somehow, Nuzo and Magnum wound up as his babysitters whenever he was allowed afield, and by default, so did Rick and TC.

Not that any of them minded. Robin was a fun guy, and he _loved_ listening to their stories, and when Rick and TC were around, his pen was going a mile a minute across his notebook while he laughed non-stop at the stupid shit the four of them had pulled off. He swore up and down that none of it was going into a news article – apparently, he fancied himself a future novelist, and one day he was going to be one of those authors with six houses on five continents and drove fast cars and drank expensive booze and nobody shot at him.

At least the guy had a good imagination.

“Well _that’s_ stupid,” Masters grumbled. “You’d think the Taliban would allow pretty much anyone to take a Hazara kid out of Afghanistan if they paid enough.”

“Well, that’s called ‘human trafficking’, so…”

This would be something along the lines of their twelfth ‘mission’ together, with Masters riding shotgun. Usually it was on a convoy or aide relief to one of the closer villages to base, but Greene wasn’t expecting anything _too_ exciting in the Valley.

Of course, they hadn’t expected anything exciting when they were running point with Academi yesterday, either.

And something still felt…off. Markham left Nuzo and Magnum to cover the EXFIL area, which Magnum already thought was a bit odd since Greene seemed to think it was his translation skills needed on this. Unless he just _really_ didn’t want them on base, bored and with nothing to do.

Which…fair.

“If we’re going to be stuck here waiting on TC and Rick, couldn’t we go and talk to some of the villagers?” Robin pressed. He lifted the camera to his eye, squinting the other one closed as he focused the telephoto lens on the mountainside cliff dwellings. “You know where this reminds me of? Mesa Verde. Wonder if there’s a common ancestor in there, or just circumstances dictating architecture?”

He wasn’t far off on the comparison. The rickety houses were built into the sheer sides of the mountains – the bottom frame work the mountain itself, while the rest of the house cobbled together bits and pieces of lumber and spare parts. Few roads existed, and the ones that did were little more than cart paths and goat trails. The military couldn’t drive in, so groups were forced to shuttle in by air on a rotating schedule, so the Taliban couldn’t plan an attack in advance on the helicopters.

The rest of the team was going door to door with the infantry and the Afghan forces, searching for weapons in the village. The valley was highly contested territory – most of the villagers had family members in the Taliban, and no love lost for invaders, or someone from another tribe trying to tell them what they were or were not allowed in their own homes.

“Can’t we go a little bit closer?” Robin asked wistfully, still using the zoom lens on the camera to spy on the group going door to door.

It was a slow process. There was a fine line between inoffensive searching and safety measures to make sure they hadn’t accidentally walked into an insurgent stronghold. The Afghani military searched the houses while the American forces kept watch outside.

“For the thousandth time, _no_ ,” Magnum said. “Once the village has been cleared, maybe, but the last thing the people want to do is talk to the guy who is raiding their houses _while_ they’re being raided. The goal is to improve relations, not destroy them.”

Masters gave a long-suffering sigh, finally lowering the camera. Telephoto observation was okay for a couple shots, but he hardly needed more than what he already had. “I’m not even sure why I’m here then, but fine. Guess I’ll just have to talk to you and Nuzo. Where is he, anyway?”

“Covering both your asses, that’s where,” Nuzo chimed in over the radio.

The two of them had their own channel to talk back and forth, though talking defeated the purpose of a hidden sniper in the trees for ‘just in case’ worst case scenarios, but Rabbit set up Magnum’s to be on a constant roll call – picking up everything on any radio channel for a mile radius, but not letting others pick up on his unless he was purposely calling.

Including channels that weren’t theirs.

Magnum still wasn’t sure that was entirely legal, or how it was possible, but the radio tech waved off his complaints with an indifferent hand.

“ _You’re the only one in the area who speaks or understands all six of the languages here, so the only one this will help is you. Least I can do is make sure you hear danger coming from as far away as possible_.”

Staying alive was a high priority for everyone, so Magnum didn’t argue but the once.

Besides.

Rabbit was terrifying in her own right. Rick’s offering of pomegranates was akin to offerings to wrathful gods of old.

“Right. No talking to Oversight,” Robin sighed. “Guess I’ll just have to amuse myself with you, Magnum.”

Thomas smirked, keeping one eye on the group as they continued their search. One of the American soldiers was talking to a town elder, but while the discussion looked animated, it didn’t look violent, which was a step in the right direction.

“As long as you don’t ask about adoption policies or how to smuggle children across international borders, ask away,” he said.

“So, what’s the deal with this valley? I know it’s the site of some of the heaviest fighting, but why does this place matter?”

Magnum blew out a breath between clenched teeth, whistling slightly. “Loaded question, man. Strategically, it doesn’t matter at all.” He gestured vaguely with the muzzle of his rifle up the mountain and down the other side. “The terrain here is a problem for us, but a benefit for the Taliban. It’s hard to get around, it’s dangerous during the day and impossible at night. We can’t truck in heavy troops, so we have to shuttle in smaller groups to an even smaller base. It’s cold eleven months out of the year, radios don’t work except in short range because of the mountains, satellites can’t see in because of the trees and that’s nothing to say of the caves, and the locals aren’t likely to help us out because they associate us with the last people who invaded – the Russians – which didn’t go well for Afghanistan. A lot of them have family in the Taliban, and in here, family is everything. Some of them can trace back their families for a thousand years or more – that’s impressive in a first world country with internet access and whole companies devoted to genealogy, and here they don’t even issue birth certificates. So, they don’t want to help us, and they believe that the Taliban rule of Afghanistan is the lesser evil, or even better than it’s been in their memories.”

“So why are we even here?” Robin asked. Without taking his eyes off of Magnum, he fished his notebook and pencil out of his vest pocket. “Seems like a lot of risk for minimum reward. Wouldn’t troops be better served elsewhere?”

Magnum shrugged. “We’re not even in a war against a country, Rob. We’re in a war _in_ a country against an _idea_. Who the hell knows? But here – use your camera. Check out the graffiti on the side of the mountain over there. Bright red.” He pointed to the Script writing. “See it?”

Robin lifted the telephoto lens, searching for the graffiti. “Yeah. What is that?”

“It’s a telephone number – Pakistani cellphone.”

“I take it that doesn’t say something like ‘for a good time call Trixie’?” Robin dead panned. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see several spots in the village – on the sides of houses, on the side of the mountain, even one written on an old tree.

 “Those are recruiter numbers left behind for people to call to join the fight with the Taliban,” Magnum explained. “Not all the fighters in the valley are even Afghani – a lot of them are foreigners who come here to wage jihad against the Americans. Even if we moved, there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t just follow the troops – to some place better, some place worse…I doubt even they would know.”

He gestured with a vague nod of his chin towards the north, beyond the village and beyond the mountains. “The only significance to this valley is what lays beyond it. The Pech river is a major corridor for moving troops and supplies, and since we set up outposts here, the attacks on the river have gone down exponentially, and we don’t have a way of strategically separating the two locations, so…here we are.”

“You should really consider taking Greene up on his offer to have you do ops briefings,” Nuzo said across the radio. “I think _I_ just learned something.”

“Shut up, Overwatch. Isn’t your job supposed to be a _silent_ one?”

“Someone’s missed snack time,” Nuzo teased. “Masters, you got anything in that vest of yours?”

“You know, I think I do…” Robin said, digging animatedly through his vest pocket.

Everyone carried chocolate in their gear somewhere. Technically, it was used for public relations – chocolate was a universal language, and the culture here operated on a give and take basis. You couldn’t show up to someone’s home with nothing. Besides – the kids loved it, and despite the media coverage or what the Taliban tried to spin, no one was here to create another generation of enemies to fight.

Thomas rolled his eyes, glancing back at the rest of the team. It looked like they were wrapping up their search – the village was small, and intel had it low on the priority list as a hot spot. The Afghani military just wanted help making sure the Taliban hadn’t created a weapons depot under the guise of just another village.

He pressed a hand to the earpiece of his radio headset. “White Knight to Chariot, you on your way? Looks like we’re wrapping up early.”  

There was a beat, before “I thought I told you, _I ain’t nobody’s chariot_ ,” TC growled. The words might be menacing, but Thomas could hear him smile even over the radio.

“Whaaat? Since when? Do you _really_ prefer ‘Little Bird’? You got a thing for oxymorons?” Thomas teased.

“You wanna walk home?” TC countered.

“Doesn’t matter if I want to, I have Masters _and_ Nuzo. You wanna tell Lara you left her two favorite people out on a mountainside just to spite me over a nickname?”

“Gotcha there, buddy,” Rick laughed.

Wherever they were, they were close enough Thomas could hear the steady _whump_ of the Venom’s rotors echoing off the valley. The fact that they could even hear one another on the radio meant they were only about a mile away.

“Hey, you’re _my_ gunner,” TC snapped. “Don’t go siding with the Frogman.”

“Rick knows the winning side when he sees it,” Thomas said. “You almost here?”

“One, this argument ain’t over, and two, ETA is five minutes. Charlie’s ahead of us, should be there in about…three minutes.”

The UH-1’s were handy for taking off in small areas, or just plain hard to get to places. Unfortunately, the same reasons that made them excellent evasive birds meant they couldn’t hold that many people. Ten was the limit, and that was pilot included.

“How’s it looking?”

“All quiet on the western front,” Rick said. He had to shout to be heard over the open door Magnum knew he was sitting in front of, and he could just picture the door gunner leaning lazily against the GAU Gatling, looking for all the world like he was on a vacation taking a helicopter tour. The laid back attitude got him in a fair amount of trouble with his chain of command, but Thomas wouldn’t have anyone else riding shotgun – that man had scary good aim, and if he cared even a smidgen about advancement, he’d have been a gunnery sergeant months ago. “How’s your end?”

Magnum glanced around, noting that the expedition team was almost back to the EXFIL point, hardly rushing and while alert, didn’t appear on edge. The search was a successful one – nothing to be found. “Another day in paradise.”

“Magnum, _get_ –” Nuzo’s warning was cut off mid shout as the world seemed to explode around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, fair warning, I am ignoring a lot of protocols. One, because OPSEC. Two...it's boring as hell to write and I hate it. Hannah is going to be featured in here pretty much as a reference without actually showing up since we already saw her on screen, so I'm just going to write about him telling the guys that he thinks she's the one who set them up. Also, we haven't had an interest in the Korengal since like...2008? So in reality, I bet the show is going to say they were captured elsewhere, and hidden in the Korengal because no one was interested in it, and therefore, an easy and good place to hide people. I think that's all the random things I needed to clarify...if you see something else, lemme know, and of course, come say hi over on Tumblr @disappearinginq.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bring on the whump, boys and girls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just watched the season finale, and DAMN. I kinda dig Angry Rick, and I am beyond happy they had scenes with just Rick and Hannah. I won't spoil anything else, other than I CAN'T WAIT FOR FALL SEASON!  
> Also, everyone who was looking forwards to this should thank @gaelicspirit, @blazeofobscurity, and @pandigirl, because without them, this would've never happened, and I would still be staring at a blank screen.

Magnum didn’t even question Nuzo’s half command – even as bullets ricocheted off the cliff wall behind where he was standing a moment ago, he was already on the move, ducked low and moving fast as he grabbed Robin’s vest, yanking him down and shoving him alongside him, keeping between the reporter and the trees before he even consciously registered that was the source of gun fire.

“Stay low!” he ordered, turning fractionally towards the trees to return cover fire. He didn’t have any delusions he’d hit someone but forcing them to take cover long enough for them to find their own was the best he could hope for.

They were out in the open. The EXFIL area on the top of an almost sheer sided mountain that goats would be lucky to climb, never mind people, which was _supposed_ to deter and prevent ambushes.

He could hear Markham shouting to his own guys, the larger group the more obvious target, but they had shit for cover. The winding path they had to take from the village was the perfect kill box scenario – the sheer cliff to one side impossible to scale with the amount of gear they carried, and would leave them even more open, unable to return fire.

The battalion hit the dirt, Markham shouting orders that Magnum could barely hear, but he saw the soldiers calling orders to one another, and the radio operator shouting intel to the JSOC.

Their position allowed minor coverage, but it made it impossible to return fire without leaving themselves exposed.

“Contact left, contact left!”

He yanked Robin down beside him, shoving him back against the cliff wall.

“Don’t move unless I tell you to,” he snapped. “Nuzo, talk to me!”

“ _I count twenty minimum, but hard to tell –_ ” Nuzo cut off abruptly, and Magnum heard the recognizable _crack_ of the McMillan TAC-338. “ _At least one less_.”

The familiar roar of the UH-1 Venom shot overhead, so close to the tree line Magnum ducked out of instinct as it cleared the mountaintop with scant feet to spare, firing into the tree line as soon as they cleared the mountain.

That _had_ to be Rick. Charlie’s gunner was good, but he lacked Rick’s confidence and blatant disregard for contact rules of engagement and wouldn’t _dare_ open fire with less than 20 yards between insurgents and troops.

“ _White Knight seems a damnable shame of a nickname when we’re the ones always coming to your rescue.”_

The Venom curved around, arcing above the tree line as the roar of the Gatling competed with the echo of the rotors.

 The machine gun fire was a momentary deterrent, and no matter how good TC and Rick were, they couldn’t just hover overhead and fire until they were out of ammo – even if they gladly would. Visibility was shit from the air, limiting Rick’s sniper style accuracy even with a fully automatic weapon, and the same trees obstructing _their_ view was perfect cover for the insurgents. They’d be sitting ducks and perfect targets, and besides gunners, Venoms were woefully short on weapons systems that could be used in close contact scenarios.

But it _did_ give the people on the ground a chance to scramble for cover.

Magnum was up again, dragging Robin to his feet by his vest, making a break for the ridgeline. Markham’s guys were going to have to move back towards the village to the narrow goat path that would lead up to where the Venom would land rather than move forwards towards them, but Magnum’s concern was Robin.

TC circled around, swinging the Venom out and around in a wide circle and he could hear him cursing over the radio – this was a rare team operation with people besides just Magnum and Nuzo on the ground, and the abrupt shift in tactics was always an initial jolt.

Alone, it would simply be TC getting close enough to the ground Nuzo and Magnum could hop onboard, Rick kept them covered with the Gatling, and ta da, make their exit.

Now, they couldn’t have two birds down in the same vicinity, that was just asking for an RPG to take the lot of them out, which meant they had to linger longer than the 40 or so seconds it normally took for EXFIL, and the longer they weren’t _leaving_ , the more of chance they had of taking a lucky shot to something vital.

That was how TC lost his second gunner.

Thomas scrambled up the loose shale siding of the mountain, struggling to maintain his grip on Robin while still keeping his rifle and his line of sight towards the trees, shooting at whatever movement he saw coming their way while trying not to fall on the slippery slope.

Charlie’s chopper was down – skids barely touching the rocky top of the mountain, Charlie’s gunner – Johnson? – keeping his guys covered as they piled into what space they could.

The insurgents were getting cockier, or perhaps just suicidal, the prospect of their targets escaping emboldening them to leave the tree line despite Johnson’s M240 laying down cover fire enough to cut the smaller trees in half.

But they weren’t heading for the larger target, or even the easier one, of the downed helicopter loading troops.

They were heading for Magnum and Robin.

“What the…?” he muttered.

That didn’t make sense. On _any_ level. Taliban was all about terrorist activities, and that meant max casualties no matter the method. Soft targets were easiest, but in lieu of that, it was however many people they could take down, and _especially_ if meant taking out local military too – it was their version of showing that not even Afghani forces were enough to stop them, and the more of the local military taken out, the more the Taliban’s reputation grew.

Robin’s foot caught on an outcropping, making him trip and go to all fours, sliding backwards down the mountain, scrabbling for purchase on the sharp rocks that pulled loose in his hands as he went. Magnum’s hand still latched onto Masters’ vest, but he didn’t notice him trip until the journalist was pulling him backwards and off balance.

Magnum swore violently as he hit the dirt and rocks, the sharp edges of the shale slicing through the knees of his frogsuit as he twisted around mid-slide, just managing to avoid falling backwards down the slope.

“ _Magnum, get back up!”_ Nuzo shouted. Three more cracks from the rifle. “ _I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on, but they are coming **straight for you**_.”

They didn’t fall _all_ the way back down, but they lost valuable yardage – and Robin’s hands were sliced to ribbons from trying to find a handhold. But Robin wasn’t looking back up the mountain, he was looking down, back towards the insurgents.

Before he could yell at him about _move, you moron_ , Robin had his camera up, rapid fire shooting towards the Taliban making a beeline for them.

Several things happened in the next few seconds.

Someone from the Taliban saw the label on Robin’s vest, shouting out “ _Hagha zhornâlist!_ ” as he pointed Masters out to the men next to him.

Magnum grabbed Robin by the back of his vest, physically yanking him to his feet and practically throwing him in front of himself so that he could turn around and return fire to the Taliban, shooting several of them before he turned back, climbing as fast as he could back up after Robin.

Nuzo appeared out of what seemed like thin air on the ridge above them, his frogsuit covered in dust and the McMillan aimed back down the cliff to cover their retreat.

Masters stumbled forwards, hitting _hard_ on all fours before collapsing face first into the dirt, and didn’t move.

“Shit, _Masters_?” Magnum shouted. “Nuzo?”

“I’ve got you covered, you get him, I got _them_!” Nuzo dropped the McMillan, letting the sling catch it as he picked up his M4, flicking the safety to semi-auto as he fired over their heads.

Magnum was at Robin’s side in an instant, but he couldn’t stop to assess the damage. He pulled him up by his vest, fishing his fingers through the straps on the back as a hand grip, dragging the journalist up the mountain behind him.

Robin didn’t say a word. He _did_ try and get his feet underneath him, pushing off the ground every few steps, but mostly let Magnum drag him. Magnum tried not to focus on the hole in the back of Robin’s vest where the back plate should’ve been, or the distinct dampness in the surrounding black material, or how the white text was slowly turning deep, dark red.

“Markham, _wait_!” Magnum shouted over the radio. “Civilian down, I need you to take him!”

Markham’s crew included at least one medic, possibly two depending on the Afghani forces, and much more importantly, they would be leaving sooner than they were.

Markham didn’t argue, and he didn’t have to ask for volunteers to take the next ride – two of his own men jumped out as soon as Magnum’s message came over the radio, clearing a space for Robin.

Magnum all but threw the journalist onto the UH-1, giving the medic anything he could, which wasn’t much – Robin hadn’t been wearing a back plate, which wasn’t all that uncommon for soldiers, never mind civilians, on hotter than hell days like today – the plates were heavy, trapping heat and sweat underneath your clothes as they rubbed your skin raw through the material.

Magnum squeezed Robin’s hand, despite the bloodied cuts across them. “You’re gonna be fine, Rob, you hear me? Yankee is the best goddamn medic in the biz.”

Robin managed a snort of what was probably supposed to be laughter, but it devolved into a violent bought of coughing, red speckling his lips as he continued to hack and heave.

“We got him sir, go!”

Magnum double thumped the side of the chopper door near Charlie’s position, ducking back down behind the ridge line as the huey took off, practically shooting upwards as Charlie pulled the chopper around, giving Johnson another clear shot at the tree line with his M240.

If it’d been anyone else, the two hueys would’ve hit one another as TC swooped in like a bird of prey, not even bothering to set the skids down as he pulled up in front of them.

“’Bout goddamn time,” TC snarked, but Magnum could see the tense set of his shoulders, the laser gaze fixed on the shit show below them.

“Waiting on you now,” Magnum snarked back, even as TC hit the cyclic, pulling the helicopter up and over in a damn near roll as he took off.

The bottom of his stomach dropped slightly at the abrupt change in altitude, like riding a roller coaster, but it felt like the best thing in the world to him. He glanced over at Nuzo, who was grabbing onto the hand hold loops in the ceiling, rifle still in his lap as he kept an eye on the opposite side of the chopper.

The two other men with them weren’t _well known_ to him, but he at least knew who they were. Dallas and Matthews.

“Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for giving up your seats for Masters!” he said.

Dallas waved him off. “We like ‘im too, sir. And it’s not like we had to wait long for the next flight out.”

Magnum couldn’t help the grin.

Laughter in the face of danger. He could appreciate that.

At least they were alive.

Point two seconds later, he could’ve kicked himself for even thinking it, because the Universe hated it when you got cocky.

“What the… _RPG!”_ Rick shouted.

TC didn’t even ask what side, he yanked the controls hard to the right, sending the Venom sideways.  The chopper veered violently to one side as an RPG hurtled past the open door, TC narrowly avoiding being hit dead on.

It hit the tail rotor instead.

The entire helicopter lurched, and the turn TC put them in to dodge the rocket propelled grenade became an uncorrectable spiral, the force of the explosion flinging the rear of the chopper a hundred and eighty degrees as TC fought with the controls.

It was a losing battle.

Magnum could smell the reek of hydraulic fluid even in the open-air cockpit, the plume of thick, black smoke from the ruined rotor cutting through the sky, following behind them in their spin.

They were going to crash.

* * *

 

As they spiraled in a dead spin, alarms blaring warning that their altitude was off, that fuel was low, that crashing was imminent, Rick reached for his harness even as he braced himself against the bulkhead behind him.

The rigging was to prevent him from falling out in the event of evasive maneuvers, but the last thing he wanted was to be literally tied to a crashing helo, because if they were _lucky_ , they would hit the side of the mountain and stop.

Lucky wasn’t how he was feeling so far today.

Inertia spun him backwards, slamming his back into the gun mount, and for a moment, everything went numb. He forgot to breathe. The world spun dizzingly inside the helicopter, matching the sickening swirl of colors as the Venom dropped faster, the alternating whirl of blue sky and green and brown mountain blurring together.

“Brace!” TC shouted, and not two seconds later, the Venom slammed into the side of the mountain, hitting broad side against the rocks and trees. The main rotor blades sliced into the mountain, snapping off with metallic bangs and screeching of bent metal even as the swishplate continued to spin. He could hear the metal snapping off and flying into the trees. The entire aircraft shuddered, and Rick closed his eyes, sure the next thing that was coming was an eruption of flames as the remaining fuel caught fire.

But it didn’t.

Instead, it began to roll.

If he thought the crash spiral was bad, it was nothing compared to the ass over teakettle spin that slammed them one way and then the next, the 12,000 pounds of metal crushing the thin alpine trees as it crashed through the trees and throwing the occupants around the cabin like loose luggage.

Dallas hit the roof with a sickening crack and fell silent, his limbs flopping about like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

They hit something more solid than a tree, and with an almost comical yelp of surprise, Magnum, who was sitting closest to the door being the last one on, was gone, thrown clear of the cabin on jarring impact.

“THOMAS!” Nuzo shouted, but before he could leap after him, the downed Venom rolled again, spinning tail first to slide down the mountainside.

The metal on rock and tree sounded like nails on a chalkboard, and for a horrifying moment, Rick wondered if they were going to fall like this forever. They’d been killed in the RPG hit, and this was their Hell.

The tail boom caught something, whipping the cabin around in almost 180-degree flip that made Rick want to throw up even more, until finally they Venom crashed into something that didn’t give, and he slammed backwards into the gun mount and everything went black.

* * *

Something happened.

Something bad.

But he couldn’t remember what.

Something in the air burned, and he came to sputtering and coughing as he tried to suck in oxygen instead of dirt and blood.

Everything was blurry. Or covered in red. His eyes stung and his head throbbed in time with his heart, which echoed strangely in his head. Sounds echoed like he was underwater, muffled and indistinct even as they grew louder.

His entire chest _ached_ , and his head was killing him.

He tried to move. To will his hands to push himself upright. To force his legs to bend.

Nothing.

He blinked, and minutes had passed. Or maybe they hadn’t, and it just felt that way. Something warm dripped down the side of his face, and he hoped to hell it was blood and not fuel.

Something dug painfully into his back, just below the reach of his TAC vest, but he couldn’t make himself move away.

He coughed and tasted blood. He ran his tongue experimentally along the side of his cheek, hissing slightly when he found a sizeable chunk missing.

He should move.

Why couldn’t he?

He turned his head slightly, the only thing he _could_ do, and saw TC still strapped into the wreckage of the cockpit, sagging against his restraints and unmoving.

“TC?” he rasped. _Jesus_ , was that _his_ voice?

The pilot didn’t move.

“TC?” he said, louder, despite the fact that it felt like shards of broken glass were rubbing against the inside of his throat.

He was met with silence.

“ _TC!_ ” he shouted, and this time, put every ounce of effort and will into moving his arm enough to hit the back of the pilot’s chair. “ _Wake up!_ ”

 _This_ time, TC at least stirred. He sounded about as happy as Rick felt, groaning as he carefully pulled himself upright, hissing as awareness returned and all the bruises, bumps and possible broken bones made themselves known.

Rick let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

The wreckage shook slightly, and Rick flinched. He did _not_ want a repeat performance, and when he glanced back up towards the open cargo doors above him, he thought he was seeing things.

Thomas Magnum was leaning over the side, bruised and battered and covered in pine needles, dirt and blood, but very much _alive_.

“How many lives _do_ you have?” he slurred incredulously, blinking against what was surely a phantom. The guy had _literally_ been thrown from a rolling helicopter wreck. 

Ghost Magnum flashed that obnoxious grin of his, the one that meant he was just as surprised as the rest of them that he wasn’t dead. “At least one more.”

He cautiously pulled himself over the edge of the cabin, bracing his feet against the broken pieces of metal as improvisational footholds, carefully climbing down towards him. He reached out a hand to check Dallas’s neck for a pulse, his lips pressing into a grim line when he found none. “Dammit.”

Where the hell was Nuzo? And the other kid? Matt? Matthews?

“Nuzo is already outside. Little banged up, but looks better than you right now, which is something I never thought I would say,” Magnum explained. “He’s got Matthews.”

Had he asked that aloud?

“You did,” Magnum answered. He pulled his combat knife from the appendix carry on his belt, slicing through the harness with ease. “Can I move you?”

Rick wiggled his toes, and they responded, albeit sluggishly, and not without a stabbing pain shooting from his lower back all the way down to his toes. “Yeah, sure.”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Fine, as in if I move you, it’ll be painful but you’ll live, or fine, as in if I move you, you’re gonna bleed out?”

“That first one. Fair warning – there might be some tears.” He groaned as Magnum hefted him up by his TAC vest, but it wasn’t _too_ bad. Just serious bruising, some scrapes and cuts.

Until Magnum tried pull him up to where his spine straightened.

 _Agony_ didn’t even _touch_ on how it felt. His entire spine felt like it’d ignited underneath his skin, his legs giving out completely underneath him as he toppled forwards into Magnum who fell back against the vertical floor of helicopter.

Air? What was air? Who needed air when your entire back felt like someone poured molten lava down it?

It took him several _long_ seconds to realize Magnum was trying to talk to him.

“Rick? _Rick_? Talk to be, bro, you gotta tell me what’s wrong!”

Rick blinked back tears he didn’t know had started to form, but was unashamed because _goddammit, that **hurt**_.

“Told you there would be tears,” he gasped, his hands fisting against Thomas’s TAC vest, digging into the straps to hold himself upright through sheer force of will. “It’s fine.”

“Fuckin’ liar,” Magnum hissed. “Nuzo!” he shouted upwards. “I need you to help us out!”

A moment passed, and Nuzo’s head popped into view.

The chief didn’t look too bad, considering. A bruise was blossoming across his cheek, and it would be a hell of a shiner when the colors came in, but other than that…he looked miraculously okay.

Not fair. They weren’t even wearing seat belts.

“Pull him up, I got his legs.”

Nuzo nodded, grabbing onto the shoulders of Rick’s vest and bracing his feet against the edge of the cabin. “Sure thing, kid. Count of three? One, two…” and then hauled on the vest as Thomas lifted him as high as he could as straight as he could.

Not that it helped.

Rick swore.

Violently.

In several languages.

By the time Nuzo managed to get him back on the ground, stretched out flat, Rick’s jaw ached from clenching it so tight, and the blood in his mouth was fresh from another bite out of it.

“Can you feel your legs?”

“The screaming wasn’t a giveaway?”

Nuzo snorted. “Don’t be a smartass, dumbass. Can you move your toes at all?”

Rick gave a bitter laugh. “You know, I really don’t feel like trying right now, Nuz. Can you leave me alone for a second to hide my tears of pain before you go asking me to make it worse?”

Nuzo didn’t move, just sat next to him, looming over like some evil Mother Hen.

“I could move them when I was in the chopper,” Rick said. “Pretty sure I’m just bruised to hell and back thanks to the gun mount.”

The older man nodded. “Yeah, that’d do it. If that’s the case, I got good news for you, it’s probably just seriously bruised rather than broken. It’s gonna suck, but you’re gonna be able to walk out of here.”

“And the bad news?”

“We’re gonna need you to run.”

 _Fuuuuuck_ that.

He craned his head to look at Matthews. The kid was alive, but barely breathing, laid out next to him on the dirt. Nuzo or Magnum had already taken his IFAK and dressed the worst of his injures, but the kid must’ve been slammed around pretty good in the cabin as it rolled. His face was almost unrecognizable from the bruising and the swelling. Looked like he’d lost a few teeth, too, and his leg was braced on either side with broken branches and parts of his own sleeves to hold it immobile as best they could manage.

He wondered if he knew Dallas didn’t make it.

A loud crash had him jolting upright and immediately stifling a scream of pain as white-hot agony shot down his spine.

“Sorry,” TC apologized, leaning heavily against the upturned side of the wreck. He held one hand up to his head, the other one bracing himself against the huey. “Must’ve rung my bell a little harder than I thought.”

“Sure,” Magnum scoffed. “If that’s what we’re calling a grade two concussion, sure. Absolutely.” He lowered himself over the side of the helicopter, moving gingerly even as he put TC’s arm over his shoulder and lead him away from the crash, setting him down next to Rick.

Maybe he did hurt himself a little more than Rick initially thought. It was just catching up to him a little slower as the adrenaline started to abate.

“We need to move further,” Thomas pointed out. “Away from the wreckage.”

“Agreed. How?”

Turned out it didn’t matter.

 _Someone_ shot them down. Someone who couldn’t have been too far, in order to hit with relative accuracy.

That someone turned out to be a lot of someones.

There had to have been at least fifty of them. They just seemed to melt out of the trees, carrying everything from Kalashnikovs to staves and machetes, clashing jackets over worn perahan tunbans.

They were shouting in everything from Dari and Pashto to Hungarian and Russian and Punjabi and Urdu, so fast and everyone at once that even Thomas had trouble trying to keep track of what was being said.

Rick didn’t need to know any of it to get the general gist.

On your knees. Surrender. Drop your weapons. Any variation thereupon.

One man stepped forwards. He was a little taller than the rest, his jacket a camouflage one with fake ranking hastily stitched onto the shoulder. He addressed Thomas directly, but Rick didn’t follow, and he knew neither did TC or Nuzo.

Shit creek didn’t even touch on how screwed they were.

Rick was more than a little amazed they were still alive instead of shot the second they were found. It wasn’t like they had any way to fight back. Not in their condition, not without a weapon, not with those numbers.

The man gestured towards Rick, and Magnum immediately side stepped in front of him, speaking rapidly and angrily in whatever the hell language it was.

It didn’t sound like it was going in their favor.

“ _Taslim sha!_ ” the man shouted.

“ _Lomre marg_!” Thomas yelled back.

It was the wrong thing to say.

The man hauled back with his rifle and slammed the butt of it into Magnum’s face, and the smaller man dropped like a stone, unconscious before he hit the ground.

TC jumped to his feet, despite listing to one side before correcting himself, looking like he was prepared to beat the man to death with his own weapon.

And _then_ he was going to get angry.

There was more shouting. No one had any idea what the hell was being said, and no idea how to respond, and the Taliban pressed in closer, their leader shouting orders to them.

Nuzo had to physically hold TC back when the man kicked Thomas solidly in the side, spitting in disgust on the ground next to him.

The man gestured to Matthews, and with little other warning, one of the men in the crowd fired at the unconscious soldier, even as they shouted in protest, but the numbers were against them. Maybe in peak form with a gun between them, they might’ve had a chance. Instead, TC and Nuzo were wrestled to their knees, their hands forced behind their backs and bound with whatever the Taliban could find.

“ _Wadrega_!” he shouted at Rick. “ _Wadrega_!”

He had no idea what he was shouting. Probably ‘stand’ or ‘get up’, but Rick refused. He curled his lip in disgust, spitting out a bloody wad of bitten off skin and bile at the man’s feet.

“ _Khwar au zar shay_ ,” he said, staring the man dead in the eye. He couldn’t remember exactly what the hell it meant, but Magnum had taught it to him. All he remembered was it was an insult.

A pretty bad one, apparently, because the next and last thing he saw was the rifle butt coming down on his face, still red with Magnum’s blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so couple things. One, translations are at best, moderately accurate. Dari and Pashto don't directly translate to English, or the English alphabet. The translations are roughly "surrender," "death first", "stand up!" and "May be destroyed beyond recognition into the abyss of oblivion!". Yeah. The number of words in the Pashto compared to English are a little uneven, but whatever. We know how exact translations go.  
> Also, parts of this are purposely glossed over because while I've BEEN in a helicopter, I wasn't flying, and I paid minimum attention to what the pilot was telling me. Other things are purposely fudged for the sake of the story and narrative, especially the EXFIL scene. If you'd like to know how it would realistically play out, watch Lone Survivor. It's a whole slew of middle men, radio signals, etc, that are just complicated and for the sake of fanfiction, unnecessary.  
> Anyway, lemme know what you think! Reviews are always appreciated and help fuel the muse, or come and say hi on tumblr @disappearinginq!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! If it makes you feel better, part of it was from the monstrosity that was chapter four of Bad Things Happen, and the other part was because I _was_ working on this, just not this particular part. Despite my love of dark fics and whump and hurt/comfort, I much prefer the vague/off screen action, rather than being hit in the face with graphic descriptions of violence. So this was a struggle to show the seriousness of the situation without it having to be all...squicky. Anyway. Delayed long enough! ONWARD!

It was freezing cold. And damp as hell. And smelled like mildew and damp dirt.

When he was nine, his parents took him on a road trip to Hannibal, Missouri, because he was in love with the story of Tom Sawyer. They stopped at Mark Twain’s house, explored Lover’s Leap, had their pictures taken in front of the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn statue. It would be the last time they did anything as a family that wasn’t part of a court case, but he didn’t know it at the time.

The part he remembered the best though, was the Mark Twain Cave. Right next to their campground, his parents let him take the tour seven times, and every time, his favorite part was when they were deep in the cavern and their tour guide would turn off their flashlight and throw them into pitch darkness so thick he could feel it pressing down on him. It’d been ninety degrees outside that whole trip, but in the cave, he shivered in the cool and damp. The cave smelled different than anywhere else he’d ever been, and as soon as the lights were out, he could just imagine he’d stepped onto a different planet.

He felt like he’d just stepped back into that cave.

Rick blinked his eyes open. At least, he thought he did. It was dim and dark enough it took him a minute to realize they were open. Well, one of them anyway. His left eye was stubbornly refusing to open more than a mere slit and felt tacky and crusty against his skin.

Caged fluorescent bulbs with frayed wiring flickered overhead at odd intervals, casting shadows from the bars against the ceiling.

_Bars_?

He tried to push himself up and his back _ignited_.

“Mother _fu-_ ” he hiss through gritted teeth, biting down hard on his lower lip as he tried to keep quiet. Except _ow_ , why the hell did his _face_ hurt too?

“ _Finally_ ,” someone said off to his right. “I was beginning to wonder if I was gonna have to decide between the Kiss of Life or sharing my cell with a coma patient.”

Rick snorted at that, except it came out barely more than a puff of air as he realized his entire chest ached, too, and trying to do more than lying there breathing was just a bad idea all around.

“Please tell me nobody kissed me,” he grumbled, using his left hand to carefully prod along the side of his face, wincing when his fingers came into contact with a raised split of skin across his forehead, just over his left eye. The blood was dried and cracked, itching like mad as he tenderly tried to scratch it loose. That at least explained was his eye didn’t want to open. “What happened?”

TC leaned over him, filling his entire field of vision. “What do you remember? And stop touching that. We don’t have anything to clean it with and your hands are filthy.”

Rick huffed irritably but stopped trying to rub at it. Still itched like crazy.  “Uhh…I think I remember a firefight.”

TC sighed. “Understatement of the year, but okay. Magnum and Nuzo got ambushed, it was an emergency EXFIL that went to shit. Took an RPG to the rotor, crashed into a mountain, decided to go for a spin down the side of it. Miraculously survived. Got picked up by the Taliban.”

Images flashed through his memory as TC spoke. The smell of the hydraulic fluid, the screech of rending metal as the helicopter crashed nauseatingly end over end down the side of the mountain.

The crack of Dallas’s neck snapping as he collided with the ceiling.

Matthews shot point blank by the Taliban.

Magnum dropping like a stone after being hit in the face with a rifle.

He groaned at the memory of that same rifle coming down on him. “Where are we? And how did we get here?”

“A cave,” TC said succinctly. “I’d rate it one of five stars, would not come here again. Management is negligent at best, and no mints on the non-existent pillows. And a lot of people sharing one space.” TC sighed, leaning back against the bars near Rick’s head so all he had to do was turn his head to see.

It reminded him of a dog kennel. Cages made of scrap everything – wood, metal, rocks – lined a squared open space in the middle where a fire pit ringed with stones still smoked. Stringed lights like one would find in a mine lined the walls, though half the bulbs worked, casting everything into harsh shadows.

In the cages were people. Filthy, dirt streaked faces peered out from behind makeshift bars of iron and wood scraps, huddled together for warmth against the chill of the cave. They weren’t locals – not by the color of their skin beneath the grime, or their clothes.

These were people that the Taliban captured for ransom from other countries. Tourists. Welfare workers and hospital staff and foreign journalists.

The cages were stacked on top of one another, and Rick shuddered at the implications for the people in the lower ones. He doubted plumbing was included in their amenities.

“And we didn’t get here by walking,” Nuzo said. “I’d guess three or four miles from where we went down, until they could get us to trucks. After that...” the older man trailed off. “Anyone’s guess. But I doubt we’re out of the Korengal. It’s too good a hiding spot for them, which means it’s a good enough hiding spot for us, too.”

“What’s our status?” Rick asked, allowing himself to drop back down, back flat against the cave floor, his eyes automatically closing against the overhead bulb. The ground was sharp and uneven, but at least he could feel it. Situation aside, at least he wasn’t paralyzed from the waist down. At least there was _one_ upside to this misery.

TC didn’t immediately answer, and Rick cracked his own good eye open again.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense with all the good news,” he drawled.

Nuzo and TC shared a look before TC took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, Rick suddenly realized what he was missing.

There were only three of them.

“Where’s Thomas?” he demanded, jackknifing upright so fast he saw stars and couldn’t help the stifled cry of pain as his back made itself known again. Their cages were small, but right next to each other – TC propped him up to be able to look around and Nuzo was alone. A quick glance around the cages lining the rest of the cave told him what his gut already knew.

Magnum was gone.

“Is...is he dead? Did they leave him on the mountain?” he demanded, voice shaking more than he would like. This was war. Loss of life was expected. He’d lost more than one friend already, but not Magnum.

Not Thomas.

“He’s alive,” TC soothed, firm hands on his shoulders to keep him from turning around and aggravating an already serious injury. “At least he was last time we saw him.”

“Last time?” Rick echoed. “What the hell? How long have we been here? How long has he been gone?”

“Do I look like I have access to a clock?” TC snapped. “I know what you know, _Orville_.”

Rick bit his lip, physically stopping himself from snapping the first thing that came to mind. It wasn’t like they weren’t all in the same boat.

Cage.

Whatever.

“Do you know why he isn’t with us?” he asked instead. There were multiple reasons why Thomas wouldn’t be in the immediate vicinity beyond just the knee-jerk assumption that he was dead and left on the mountainside to be picked over by scavenging animals. Ranking officers were sometimes kept separate from other prisoners, or if they thought that Thomas had some sort of intel that they didn’t. It could also be just a psychological tactic to make them freak out.

Which was working.

Because Thomas had the self-preservation of a lemming, and while he was ninety-nine percent a happy-go-lucky man who could be friends with anyone, he also had a singular talent for inciting violence with the same minimum effort.

TC shrugged. Nuzo, on the other hand, rubbed his chin where stubble was just beginning to grow in, his blunt fingernails scratching at the short, rough hairs.

“There was something funky about that ambush,” Nuzo said.

“You mean besides the part where like fifty Taliban fighters somehow managed to get wind of our position and had a look out with an RPG stationed in one of the many, _many_ options for escape routes that we could’ve taken to get the hell outta there?” TC asked.

Nuzo ignored the sarcasm. “We know what the Talib are like. Maximum damage, maximum terror. Soft targets over heavily armed specialty units. But they almost ignored Markham’s group. They bunched up on one flank between Thomas and Robin and ‘em. Like they were trying to separate them. And they didn’t go for the larger group with Markham, they went for Thomas.” Nuzo paused, head tilting to one side, thinking.

Rick and TC let him.

Nuzo and Magnum had approximately one thing in common besides being Navy: they were deceptively smart. While Thomas was a master of ‘winging it’, Nuzo was the other end – calculated. A lot of junior officers thought Nuzo was on par with an ox for intelligence as soon as they heard his accent and saw his rank – but unlike Thomas who was happy to let people make their assumptions, Nuzo usually smiled, nodded, and then spouted off some Plato or pointed out a brilliant tactical maneuver that saved time, money, men, and made the other side look like idiots.

“I take that back. I don’t think it was Thomas they were after,” the chief guessed. “I think it was _Robin_.”

Maybe it was the head injury talking, but that made less sense, not more, and Rick pointed out as much.

“No, you didn’t see it – the hajis were making a move on the both of them, but the more I think about it, the more I swear to God I heard one of them yell about a journalist.”

“Told you those were Taliban Bullseyes,” Rick snarked. TC just rolled his eyes.

Nuzo have a quick side half-nod. “I’m not saying there isn’t some room for error – bullets flying, two birds in the air in close proximity, more than a few people shouting…but journalist sounds pretty goddamn similar in Dari and Pashto as it does in English. It was either Thomas or Robin they were after, and it makes more sense for it to be Robin. At least, if they were only after one of them.”

“But why the hell would they care about Masters?” TC asked. “He’s not famous – he’s not a household name that America would get up in arms about if they found out he was missing or being held for ransom.”

“Does it really make more sense that they were after one random SEAL who, while a general nuisance, isn’t exactly responsible for a lot of high profile damage?”

“Depends on what you call high profile,” TC pointed out. “Together, we done some damage – especially since working with Hannah. A _lot_ of high profile targets were on that list, and you and TM were boots on the ground for all of them.”

It didn’t need to be said that half the time, Rick was on the ground with them – he was just half a mile away looking down a scope and calling out targets from a distance. Or that TC was more than just EXFIL. Taliban had very much a hierarchy when it came to pinning blame. The leader was the responsible one – that was who they had bounties on. Would they take out the whole team or group involved? Without question. But they were a tribal group, which meant tribal retribution.

Enough so that Rick often quoted ‘dishonor on _you_ , dishonor on your _cow_ ’ whenever the subject came up, no matter how many times he got yelled at for it.

“It’s not exactly advertised who’s responsible for strikes like that,” Rick said carefully. “You know that means you’re suggesting a traitor.”

Nuzo shrugged. “It’s a tactic as old as war itself. We got people in the admiralty selling plans for our carriers to China. You think the Taliban couldn’t put the squeeze on one of the local translators? Or that they couldn’t embed their own? Background checks aren’t exactly a hundred percent in this country.”

“But why not kill us outright?” TC pointed out.

“Who’s to say they weren’t trying to? How many people _you_ know walk away from a wreck like that? Or an ambush of fifty to one? Maybe they just seized an opportunity from the failed attempts to kill us. Four American military members as hostages – I don’t think many could turn that down.”

It was what they intended to do with the hostages that concerned Rick. Taliban didn’t believe that torture didn’t work. Or they just didn’t care. They were more of the ‘I believe in shooting the messenger, because it sends a message’. Captured former commandants of the Afghani secret police admitted that they were instructed to commit such atrocities that people were afraid of them before ever meeting them.

Rick glanced up at TC and could tell the big man had the same concerns.

If they were after Robin, why, and if they thought Thomas knew anything about him…

Rick let his head drop back onto TC’s extended leg, focusing on the cave ceiling above him rather than what he remembered of the bodies they’d recovered from Taliban ‘interviews’ or Thomas’s personality.

“He’s not coming back any time soon, is he.”

* * *

 

Thomas gasped at the shock of cold water to his face, sucking in a breath before he had chance to think about it. He sputtered and coughed and choked, reflexively throwing himself forwards.

Well, he would’ve.

If he wasn’t tied to where he was sitting.

He tossed his head, shaking the water out of his face and his hair, blinking blearily against the dimness of the room as it swam slowly into focus.

It wasn’t a room. Not really. Carved out of a rock wall, it still had a door and bare bulbs for lighting, claustrophobic and small, the air reeking of mildew and damp and something he didn’t want to think about.

His head pounded in time with his heart, the dim light doing nothing for the spiking ache that went across the crown of his forehead. More than just water dripped into his eyes, stinging even as he attempted to blink it away.

He was far from alone. At least four – assuming he wasn’t seeing double – unfriendly faces glowered back at him. The one directly in front of him still held the now empty bucket, a Kalashnikov hung with a three point harness across his chest. The other three were similarly armed, but their hands rested at the ready, palms flat against the stock of their guns with their fingers alongside the triggers.

Impulse made him want to ask about the others. Were they alive, were they dead, were they okay – but prudence kept him from asking. Let them think he cared more about himself than the others. Don’t let them become pressure points. Instead, his opted for default mode.

Sarcasm.

“You know, proper gun handling says ‘keep finger along the receiver until ready to fire’,” Thomas slurred. “Don’t want to accidentally shoot your buddy in the ass, do you?”

The three in the back frowned, glancing between each other, but the man in front, the one with the bucket, huffed a snort of laughter without humor, and with no other warning, swung the bucket with enough force that when it collided with Thomas’s skull, he thought for sure he was going to pass out again. Stars burst across his darkening vision and he tasted blood and dirt across his tongue and was honestly surprised that when he spit out a glob of blood and torn skin, a tooth didn’t go with it.

“ _Kah_ _āṅ hai sahāfī_?”

Thomas’s brain pulled up blank. Not Dari or Pashto. Which wasn’t all that unusual. Taliban had no unifying language, and anyone who came into the country to join their fight didn’t always bother to learn a new language. It sounded familiar, and if he hadn’t just been bashed in the head with a heavy object, he might’ve recognized it.

“ _Kah_ _āṅ hai sahāfī_?”

“I don’t speak…whatever that is,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Two of the rear guards decided they didn’t appreciate his tone, and as one threatened – at least, that’s what Thomas was guessing, given the tone – the other raised his rifle, pointing it at Magnum’s face. Language or not, the message was clear: we don’t like your attitude.

Well, look at that. Something the Taliban and American military leadership had in common.

“If you didn’t need me alive, I’d still be on that mountain.” Thomas pulled bruised lips back in something closer to a snarl than a smile. “We both know you’re not going to shoot me, so threatening to isn’t gonna do fuck all.”

It didn’t matter if they understood the exact words. They knew he wasn’t afraid of them like they wanted him to be. They didn’t shoot him.

They _did_ , however, swing the gun stock around to slap him upside the head with it, and he felt his teeth slice into the side of his cheek as his head whipped to the side from impact.  

The leader repeated the same question in the same vaguely familiar but unknown language.

“ _Habla español?_ ” he suggested, smirking through the blood pooling behind his teeth.

_That_ threw them off.

The leader frowned. Clearly, he recognized English, even if he didn’t speak it – or maybe he actually understood Magnum’s sarcasm with the first answer, which earned the bucket to the face – but Spanish wasn’t something he’d come across. Now the man was second guessing his intel.

Magnum gave a snort of derisive laughter, but almost choked again when he dislodged a glob of congealed blood from his nose.

“ _Gato tiene su lengua_?” The idiom lost something when translated, but the man got the general idea that it was unlikely Thomas was cooperating instead of mocking him.

In retrospect, he probably should’ve expected the blow, but he chalked it up to two serious head injuries. The kick caught him off guard. Even if he had his hands free, he wouldn’t have caught himself before slamming the back of his head against the ground, his entire weight plus the chair falling on top of his bound hands.

He really hoped that _crunch_ was the chair breaking, and not all of his fingers.

It took a second to remember to breathe.

It took a couple more to remember how.

“ _Kah_ _āṅ hai sahāfī_!” the man was shouting now. He grabbed a fistful of Thomas’s BDU shirt, yanking him up several inches off the ground. Thomas couldn’t even hold his head upright, instead lolling backwards. “ _Kah_ _āṅ hai sahāfī_?!”

“English, mother fucker – do you speak it?” The breathy rasp wasn’t quite as effective as Samuel L. Jackson’s classic delivery, but it achieved _something_. The man dropped him back to the ground, standing over him with his feet on either side of Magnum’s ribs as he dug into his vest pocket.

He reached down again, but instead of grabbing onto Magnum’s shirt, he fisted his hand in his hair, wrenching Thomas’s head back up to shove a worn piece of paper in his face. ““ _Kah_ _āṅ hai sahāfī_? _Cur yā?_ _Kah_ _āṅ hai cur yā_?!”

Magnum really wished he knew what the man was saying, because as his vision cleared, he finally saw what the man was holding. It was a black and white surveillance still photograph, he recognized the only two people in the picture immediately.

It was a photo of him…and Robin Masters.  

Taken at a distance, it was the two of them talking. Robin had his glasses down around his neck and his helmet removed, but the journalist label clearly visible. Thomas almost had his back to the camera, but for whatever reason, he was looking over his shoulder at someone out of view of the camera making his face clearly visible. It was unmistakably him and Robin, no point in lying about it, but what the question was, he didn’t know. The Taliban didn’t capture people for intelligence or information – they knew enough about military tactics that by the time they had information they could confirm, it would be worthless. The odds of anyone besides someone wearing stars on both shoulders would have anything worth knowing was slim to none. Taliban captured foreigners for two things: ransom, or public denouncing of their home countries involvement with Afghanistan.

This was clearly neither.

 “What about it?” he asked, wincing when the man’s grip in his hair only tightened. “I’m not trying to be an ass – I don’t know what you want me to say. _Na mey-danäm_. _Za na pohegam_!”

The man with the picture spit in disgust, but at least he released Thomas’s hair, letting his head drop back to the rocky ground. It still hurt, but at least it wasn’t like falling the distance from sitting upright to the ground.

The man muttered something incomprehensible, dragging his hand over his face as he scratched his beard with blunted nails. With little warning, he spun on his heel and kicked Magnum as hard as he could in the side.

There was an audible crack that even _he_ could hear over the sudden roar in his ears. Thomas didn’t even have the air the shout, his breath catching in his throat as he felt something _ignite_ as he reflexively tried to curl in on himself, but the ropes that bound his hands to the chair held fast as he choked on air like a fish out of water. Even if he wanted to answer, or knew what the hell he was asking, he couldn’t.

The man was screaming at him now, enraged beyond reason, spittle flying from his lips as he hauled off and kicked Thomas again.

And again.

And _again_.

In his rage, his aim was off, and a kick meant for already broken ribs missed and caught Thomas on his chin, cracking his head against the ground in an explosion of white and the sudden absence of sound that whined in his ears like a shorted speaker.

The last thing he knew was he finally recognized the language – Urdu – and understood the question: _where is the journalist?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter than every other chapter, but this is a more typical length for me. The whole story so far in a word document is over 50 pages long and currently a little over half the length of a NANO novel, and it's nowhere near to complete. No worries about it being a 'short' story, or that all breaks will be this long (I am, however, dangerously behind on another fandom's exchange fic, so I might disappear for a bit). Anyway, as always, shout out to @pandigirl19 and @blazeofobscurity over on Tumblr for listening to me plot this out and give me helpful feedback at all hours of the day and night! Let me know what you think! Feel free to come find me on tumblr as @disappearinginq!

**Author's Note:**

> This was a monster of a first chapter. I don't expect all of them to be almost 7000 words. Usually I aim for 2000 per chapter, but I had this very specific scene in mind. A lot of the aftermath of what would *actually* happen after an incident like this is completely ignored, because it's not compelling storytelling. Wert is based off a real guy - except he was still in the Navy, and a chief, not paramilitary subcontractor. Also, the bit with Masters leaving the Humvee comes back - possibly in a one shot separate from this, but more likely a later chapter - I didn't have him run off with no explanation for a reason (I promise). Oh. And fair warning, I tend to write *really* dark fics - I promise to leave the boys in the same shape I found them in though, so no permanent deaths here. Except Nuzo, but hey, I'm not the one who did that. However, everything I intend to do or describe are straight out of actual cases and reports from prisoners of the Taliban, so while violent, it's all based in reality - if that helps or makes it worse, just thought you should know up front.  
> Whew. Anyway. I thrive on feedback, and you guys have no idea how much letting me know what you think or what you'd like to see can change the course of the story, and now that we have a second season to look forwards to (WOO!), let me know what you think! Oh - and you can also come find me on Tumblr as @disappearinginq!


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